By ‘Tomiwa Fadeyi
On one of the occasions when fireworks erupted in the Court of Appeal sitting in Ibadan, the Oyo State Capital, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria whom I respect highly stood up to address the three wise men sitting on the bench.
Kazeem Gbadamosi, SAN, a former Chairman of the Ibadan Branch of the Nigerian Bar Association (hereinafter simply referred to as ‘the NBA’) had led a retinue of other Learned Silks and Counsel in a suit wherein Ibrahim Lawal, then Chairman of the Ibadan Branch of the NBA, had sued Afam Osigwe, President of the NBA and other Defendants, alleging Osigwe’s partiality, bias, and compromise in the process leading up to the NBA’s General Elections and the selection of the NBA’s Electoral Committee headed by Aham Ejelam, another Senior Advocate of Nigeria.
On that fateful day at the Court of Appeal, Gbadamosi had stood on the side of Lawal and his Co-Claimants, insisting that the selection process which produced the members of the Ejelam-led Committee was inconsistent with the dictates of the NBA Constitution. Lawal and his Co-Claimants, were also insisting that having shown and openly admitted bias, Osigwe, sued as the 6th Respondent before the Court of Appeal, should not be allowed to conduct the elections of the NBA but should cede the conduct to the Incorporated Trustees of the NBA.
Gbadamosi, however, was not to have it easy. On the other side of what is now history, stood Anthony Malik, SAN and Abdul Muhammed Rafindadi, SAN, equally exceptional men of the Silk.
Whilst addressing the Court, Gbadamosi asked a proverbial question: “If Gold rusts, what shall iron do?” The rattling Court fell silent. I saw students who had come to observe proceedings ponder. Lawyers nodded slowly. The judges slowly halted writing.
Gbadamosi lamented the conduct of Osigwe in the process leading up to the election and his handling of the judicial process. He said Osigwe and his appointed cohorts had gone ahead to disobey an Order of the Oyo State High Court, whilst also seeking refuge under another Court. Gbadamosi insisted, in his reverberating voice, that Osigwe, as President of the largest Bar Association in Africa, ought to lead by example and not disrespect the sanctity of the judicial process, and ought not be biased in the electioneering process which was supposed to usher in his successor. He said Osigwe ought not disobey the Constitution of the Association or disrespect the sanctity of the judicial process. He referred to Osigwe, the NBA, and Lawyers, as gold.
Gbadamosi noted that Lawyers are supposed to be the watchdogs of the society, and are regarded by the general public not because of the toga of the wig and gown which they adorn, but because it is believed that they live above board. People, who have no hopes, turn to Lawyers to help them find hope by the instrumentality of Justice and the Rule of Law. Gbadamosi then asked: “when Lawyers are the ones perpetrating the injustice, what shall the society do?”
Those questions, to every right-thinking Lawyer, Law Student, Judge, or even Registrar, sent a wave of genuine concern. The questions were not only nerve-racking, they were unanswerable. When one then contextualizes those questions and superimposes them upon the fact that this injustice, had in its mix, the very Lawyers who claim to shape and make the profession — Senior Advocates of Nigeria, Members of the Body of Benchers (the highest decision-making Body of the Profession), and even as I eventually realized, Past and Current Presidents of the Nigerian Bar Association — it is difficult not to have wondered in that moment, what the future of the Profession held for young, budding, unaccomplished cottons like me.
Now, that the election (or coronation, as some have put it), have come and gone, I can fully understand why Lawyers dragged their President to Court, up until the Court of Appeal, and why Senior Advocates of Nigeria stood up against their Learned Brother Silks, to protest the conduct and process leading up to the election.
I do not, for the purpose of this piece, want to go into the bickering and hassles that went into the process leading up to the election. I do not want to go into the tirade of articles written in razor-sharp language exchanged between Senior Advocates of Nigeria. I do not want to go into how the List of Eligible Voters published by the NBA’s Electoral Committee had different names which had the same Supreme Court of Nigeria numbers. I do not want to dwell on how much Osigwe refused, rather stubbornly, to make use of National Identification Numbers to secure our votes and win the confidence of the electorate. I also do not want to lay emphasis on how Osigwe and his teleguided Electoral Committee shifted the election date from 20th July, 2026, to 18th July, 2026, without any explanations. I remember that Chief Jibrin Samuel Okutepa, and Asiwaju Mutalubi Ojo Adebayo, both Senior Advocates of Nigeria warned like the Biblical Prophet Jeremiah, that doom was looming. I do not want to dwell on how Okutepa in particular, was persecuted for his opinions. I do not want to dwell on the rude realization that there exists a cabal, led by a former President of the NBA, who was calling the shots and who determined the fate of well more than One Hundred Thousand Lawyers without our inputs.
Two of the three Candidates who vied for the seat of the President of the Nigerian Bar Association — Aare Olumuyiwa Akinboro, SAN and Lateef Akangbe, SAN — identified with the masses and joined the widespread protest against the actions of Osigwe and his Electoral Committee. The only one who did not was Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya. Why did she not? Rumours were rife, and never sufficiently denied, that she was the candidate whom Osigwe backed, and intended to install as his successor. Speaking as a matter of fact and from what was filed before the Court, Osigwe, as the sitting President had openly stated that he could not be neutral. She was regarded as the establishment’s candidate.
Afam and Aham organized their election. And, to every right-thinking member of the Bar, it was nothing to write home about. The first shocker was that an election which was supposed to commence at midnight, was suspended until around 7:35am on 18th July, 2026. The election site was down, inaccessible, and thousands of voters were left unable to cast their votes. The Electoral Committee had, in what looked like a deliberate attempt, misspelt the name of one of the Presidential candidates, and removed the pictures of both Akinboro and Akangbe. Only Badejo-Okusanya had both her name and photograph intact. After voting resumed in the later hours of the morning, significant changes had been made to details on the voting platform. I wonder how anyone would sound, if they were to argue, that those changes did not alter votes.
We had instances where, for a 24-hour window, eligible voters could not cast their e-ballots. I was one of those who could not vote. The site came crashing down, and One-Time Passwords (OTPs) were trickling in without any use. Some persons got OTPs without trying to vote yet, and when they wanted to vote, their ballots had been cast by people whom they neither knew nor sent. There were credible reports of people voting more than once. It almost became funny when two of the Presidential Aspirants came out openly to declare that they could not even cast their votes for themselves. Akinboro wrote a Letter. Akangbe, visibly frantic, recorded a video. Akangbe’s account was a little funnier. He said he reached out to Osigwe, who gave him the phone number of an operator in the Information and Communication Technology Department of the NBA. Akangbe said he called the operator eight times, and when he did not pick up, called Osigwe back. Osigwe then told Akangbe that the operator was asleep. Asides the Biblical Jonah who slept aboard a ship headed for Tarshish, I never imagined that in the middle of an election of that importance, the ICT operator who perhaps had a role important enough for the President to send his number to a Candidate, could be snoring on a waterbed, but Akinboro, Akangbe, and several tens of thousands of Lawyers stayed awake because they could not vote.
Naturally, as expected and predicted, Badejo-Okusanya took the lead. Her votes were moving up sporadically, while Akangbe and Akinboro trailed sluggishly behind her like tortoises. People alleged that the backend servers had been tampered with to favour the establishment’s candidate. I, personally, have voted in every NBA election since I was called to the Bar. I can speak for myself when I say I have never seen a more shambolic electoral process in my life. Osigwe’s election, also, was controversial, but this one broke the scale of decency. We should, in my opinion, apologize to Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, for every time the NBA criticized it pertaining to an election. For an election on which Afam and Aham budgeted and claimed to have spent hundreds of millions, it was an eyesore.
By afternoon of the 18th of July, 2026, Lawyers became the butt of jokes all over the country. Everyone wondered how people who paraded themselves as ‘learned’, could have conducted such an election, which even garage touts would not descend as low to conduct.
By evening, and in deep contrast, a video of Badejo-Okusanya circulated across media platforms. An elated Badejo-Okusanya danced to the chants of her supporters as they recited the now-famous Tinubu mandate song. I wonder, truly, what was going through her mind at the time. Did she know that in reality, the people standing on her mandate were an overwhelming minority? Was she even bothered, that of the more than Eighty-Two Thousand eligible voters, only about Twenty-Six Thousand representing an underwhelming 31% were allowed to vote in the election and the others, like me, were disenfranchised? If her answers to those questions are in the negative, then we have a bigger problem in our hands.
Although she now has gone in-between church pews on the morning of Sunday, 19th July, 2026 to sing Nathaniel Bassey’s ‘Tobechukwu’, I hope Badejo-Okusanya knows in the deepest annals of her conscience, that the election which ushered her into the NBA House on Muhammadu Buhari Way in Abuja, was not free, not fair, and certainly not credible. I hope she knows that the election was awful, shambolic, and a show of shame. I hope she knows that our gold, as Lawyers and the hope of the common man, has rusted, and that she is not far from the rust.
Badejo-Okusanya now has the Herculean task of proving the legitimacy of how an election that disenfranchised a whooping 69% of the voting population, brought her into the NBA House. Can she, in good conscience, claim to be President over me, and the several tens of thousands of Lawyers who were prevented and prohibited from casting our ballots?
Like the proverbial thief who pilfered the King’s horn, where would Badejo-Okusanya blow it?
And, now that gold has rusted, what will iron do?
’Tomiwa Fadeyi, a Legal Practitioner, writes from Ibadan, Nigeria.
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