You have been in the saddle as Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) president for almost one month, what are the challenges? Have you met your  expectations so far?

The expectations of people are high. I knew from the beginning that the office is very challenging. There are many expectations from the NBA.  What I am trying to do, is to meet those expectations in line with our own goals and  ideals. It is very tasking. I have been busier than I used to be, because of meetings, because of policy formulation, because of trying to project the image of the NBA, doing things that will help us to achieve our goals, things that are related to our constituency and so on.
You addressed the Constitution Review Committee of the NBA in Abuja penultimate week Wednesday; what are the major  reasons for the review of the constitution?

The essence of the amendment of the constitution is to ensure a proper professional positioning of the NBA. We want to take politics out of the association and institute more of professionalism. To achieve this, the Bar must be structured in a way that it can perform its functions properly. Our motto is upholding the rule of law and if we must uphold the rule of law, we need to have federal, state and, probably, local government structures to be able to engage the process. One of the aims of the amendment is to achieve that.

Another aim of the amendment is to build the capacity of the Bar to meet the challenges of modern society, we are trying to build the capacity of the secretariat and we need constitutional fiat to enable us to structure the Bar in such a way that whether X officer comes in or Y officer comes in, the Bar will run efficiently without any political interference. Those are the two reasons for setting up the Constitution Review Committee.

Nigeria has just celebrated its 50 years of independence. What is your assessment of our judiciary with particular reference to the Supreme Court?
You know that there are great expectations from the judiciary, and the officers that came in immediately after independence were trained  by the colonialists.  They brought in richness and quality into the jurisprudence. Along the way, we replaced those who were trained by the colonial powers with the ones we trained. The economy has grown,  the population has grown and you do not have the same degree of control that we had when we got independence. So, it is a mixed bag. On one hand, we have made progress in terms of the intellectual quantity and the local content  of the judiciary, on another, some bad habits like corruption, inability to meet targets and some kind of  inability to properly supervise judicial officers at every level have crept in. I think that if we are able to work on these, we will have a first-class judiciary.

But we have to solve the problem of corruption. We have to solve the problem of judges who don’t meet their targets, we have to solve the problem of not being able to get appointment and the mode of removal proper. The judges are humans and some of them err, so, the disciplinary process must be spelt out.

During your campaign for the NBA presidency, you promised to do something about our criminal justice reforms; what have you done so far?
We are working on it and part of the things we need to boost first is our capacity to respond to justice sector reforms. We are trying through our mandatory continuing legal education scheme, engaging the judiciary on the issues we have just discussed, our speeches at various fora, constructive engagement on very sensitive issues on the performance of the judiciary and on the issue of the discipline of lawyers and their legal education to boost that. There are quite a number of things which time may not allow us to address. Several committees have been put in place to ensure, specially in the criminal justice system, that, within the next six months, we will roll out those mechanisms we intend to use to address the issues in that sector.

Many civil society groups have expressed  their intention to collaborate with the NBA to ensure that we have credible elections next year, what is the NBA doing to actualise this objective?
At inauguration, we set up the Electoral Justice Working Committee to deal with post-election issues, such as petitions, the pace with which they are going to be handled and the difficulties or what you may call the constraints that exist in the rules and the legislations and the challenges that election petition dispute resolution is facing. We also have, in existence, an Electoral Working Group that deals with pre-election disputes, monitoring of elections, voter education and other things.
The NBA is leading the quartet of civil societies in that line.

On the electoral justice committee, we have eight Senior Advocates of Nigeria and five other lawyers in that committee who are working on how to address the  issues of electoral justice reform. So, we have been very proactive. Very recently, we have begun to work with the NDI, which is an International Association on civil issues like elections,  on how to get the Nigerian election right. So, it is not surprising that a lot of civil society organisations want to work with the NBA because this administration is very proactive on electoral issues.  Even a week ago, I delivered a paper on this issue, identifying the challenges and it coincided with the same day  the independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) decided to set up a new time table to April 2011 for the elections.You know that we have began to exchange co-operations with INEC, with all these arrangements in place, I believe that we are being very proactive.

Zoning of the presidency of this country has generated a lot of heat in political circles. What is your view on this?

I don’t see why it is generating this heat. I have made my position clear in this.
 I do not see how the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria can be subordinated to the arrangement of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Every Nigerian contributed in voting in Umaru Yar’Adua and President Goodluck Jonathan and we expect that when there is something wrong somewhere and the president is no longer there, we expect the vice-president to be the President.

Now in every democracy,  when a vice-president takes over and shows interest to continue to execute the mandate of his team and that which Nigerians voted for, that is not usually opposed. And since the incumbent president has found himself in that position and has indicated his  interest to contest, it is for his party, following normal political norms,  to endorse it, if they so desire. But that is not a problem for the entire country because as I said, these are issues which ordinarily ought to have been resolved, it displaces the zoning formula of the PDP because it is an issue larger than the PDP. We cannot presume that it is only the PDP that will continue to produce the president of this country.

At the last Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the NBA in Kaduna,  during the debate for the abolition of the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), it  was resolved  that a stakeholders meeting should handle the issue. What have you done about it?

Yes, it was resolved to be referred to the stakeholders to decide.  The stakeholders we mean are members of the legal profession and the Legal Practitioners Privileges Committee, particularly the chairman,  who is the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN). I have not been officially served with a copy of the resolution and I don’t thing that the CJN has been given a copy of that resolution. As soon as I receive it,  I will write a letter to the CJN,  saying that this is what the entire Bar has mandated me to do. And if it pleases his Lordship,  he will call a meeting for us to discuss the issues, but I do not think that this is the only solution to the problem. We will also explore further avenues to resolve this issue, whatever is the response I get from  the CJN,  I will report back to the next conference because it is now conference that has mandated us. It is no more a matter for the  National Executive Committee (NEC) to deal with.

In the next few weeks you will chair the first NEC meeting as the president of the NBA.What do we expect to see in Gomb?
It is usually a statutory meeting for statutory members to attend, the National Executive and so on. There, we  will announce the new NEC members who would join us at the NEC meetings, Gombe is a small place, we will approve our budget and take all the reports that the conference has referred to us and then,  if we are up to a 100 days in office, we will give our reports of what we have achieved so far. It may not be all that lengthy, we are  just starting, there is not much on our plate yet. We will do our best to make sure that it is a lively meeting.

What is your message to Nigerians on this occasion of our 50th Independence Anniversary?
My message to them and the Bar looks at it critically,  is that we need to get the next elections right and should not waste our vast human and natural resources any more. If we cannot get our elections right, it is a mater of subordinating hunger and greed for power and greed for money, for what is right. If people should not tow the line of correctness, legal and political,  the government should, on this occasion, ensure that it brings out the big stick and make sure that people tow the line of what is right. The National Assembly must come back and do a lot of retinkering with the laws that they have brought out.  

Which laws are you talking about?
The Electoral Act 2010, is on my mind ; 70 per cent unworkable. It is an unworkable document as it is because the document as it stands, gives timelines that are impracticable.  It also gives a lot of stress for the Judiciary and thinks that the courts  are there only to decide election cases.
We have as a Bar suggested to them that to avoid creating and mounting  pressure on the judiciary, they should create specialised courts, you can call it a constitutional court, you can call it  electoral courts, or call it miscellaneous courts, create courts that will deal with the issues of elections. Now they have further saddled the Court of Appeal with original and appellate jurisdictions, meaning that for the next four years, that court will not do anything but keep hearing election matters.

A situation whereby  the backlog of cases is now on the average of  seven years in the Court of Appeal,  India  has an unfortunate condition.  There, it is 25 years, we will soon catch up with them. And this encourages practices where people seek redress outside the law. When people begin to seek redress outside the law, even the rich will not be able to sleep with two eyes closed. So, we need to sit down and ensure that the National Assembly returns to the drawing board and bring out a workable document; the NBA is ready to work with them on this issue, to make sure that we have a workable electoral document which will set out the framework for free and fair elections in the country.