NBA Presidency: Ex-Sec-Gen Osigwe Challenges Disqualification in Court
Ahead of Monday’s election into the national executive council of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), the last, it seems, has not yet been heard of the controversy arising from the disqualification from the polls of a presidential aspirant, Mazi Afam Osigwe, by the Alwalu Yadudu-led Electoral Committee of the NBA (ECNBA).
Following the dismissal of his initial appeal to the ECNBA in a bid to persuade it to reverse its decision, Osigwe has decided to seek redress in the court of law.
The lawyer, a former national Secretary-General of the NBA, disclosed this at a media parley in Lagos on Friday.
Although he was understandably reticent about discussing the facts of the case, or the details of his complaint (as the matter was still sub judice), Mazi Osigwe was however, forthcoming about the political maneuverings that allegedly informed his disqualification.
Newswire correspondent at the parley reports that, Osigwe, who has always insisted that the ECNBA’s decision had nothing to do with the legality or otherwise of his presidential aspiration, decried what he saw as the cynicism and arrogance of certain members of the current executive of the association concerning his ambitions – one or two of who, he said, had boasted openly that Afam Osigwe would only contest the Presidency of the NBA ‘over their dead bodies’.
Mazi Osigwe went on to say that although he was naturally reluctant about suing the same organization he was aspiring to lead, he was even more concerned about the current moral and ethical decline of an organization which was supposed to stand at the vanguard of the quest to enthrone the rule of law in Nigeria.
“Not that I love the NBA less,” Osigwe said, “but that I love justice and fair play more.” He reiterated his desire to see that the arbitrariness and impunity with which his aspiration had been treated so far did not set a dangerous precedent, as this would victimize future prospective leaders of the Bar – especially if they were perceived, as he is now, as a radical seeking to overthrow an entrenched and self-serving Bar elite and an anachronistic status quo at variance with the interests of the majority of lawyers in Nigeria.
In response to questions by correspondents, Afam, who is also a onetime Chairman of the NBA’s Abuja branch, insisted that far from a desire for self-aggrandizement, he was in the race to return the NBA to its teeming members once again. The NBA, he lamented, had become an organization of conferences and hotel rooms, rather than an association out to protect and defend the interest of lawyers – and to offer a helping hand to those in need, such as young lawyers, victims of gender discrimination at the Bar, and those with serious personal and professional challenges.
While admitting that the task before him and his legal team was an onerous one, Osigwe however dismissed the repeated comparisons between his present action and that of an aspirant in the previous election, JK Gadzama, SAN (which has subsisted in court two years after, even as the officials who emerged from that election have all but concluded their term in office) maintaining that the two complaints were not the same in character and intent.
He also used the occasion of the media parley to clarify or offer his thoughts on a number of other issues having to do with past and present issues pertaining to the workings of the NBA, as well as other legal matters.
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