I have lost faith in the Nigerian Bar Association as professional association of lawyers. Credibility, objectivity, honesty and integrity have all departed from the NBA, affairs of NBA and the politics in NBA, unfortunately. NBA is now populated with lawyers, except few, who engaged in mob actions and talks, and lawyers who do not see anything wrong with the glaring wrongs, which wrongs even the blind can see.

The most annoying thing to me is the hypocrisy of some of the most vocal legal practitioners who see wrongs and complained of wrong doing on daily basis against decisions and actions of government institutions, which decisions and actions are always taken and or done in breaches of due processes, including decisions of INEC, but did not see anything wrong with the processes of the just concluded NBA coronation.

These sets of lawyers did not see the incompetence and the illegality in the composition of ECNBA and even the lack of independence of the so- called ECNBA.These lawyers could not see that the ECNBA was teleguided to produce a pre-determined outcome. It is sad that NBA has lost everything noble. Lawyers who did not vote are far more than the lawyers that were alleged to have voted. The processes agreed to be used were jetisoned for processes to produce who the cabals want. The legal profession is going to be the worse for this. Shame on those who see nothing wrong with the wrongs that were done in all the processes that culminated in the coronation just concluded.

For me I have also lost faith in the honesty and integrity of those who were very critical and threatened fire and brimstone over the glitch in the INEC viewing portal then. These same sets of lawyers are now excusing the glitch in the NBA portal that clearly showed incompetence and or a pre- determined system to favour their coronated president.

These NBA elections opened my eyes to apprecaite how hollow and shallow most of the people who pontificate and called politicians names are. Any credible election is determined by the credibilityof the processes leading to election. In this year NBA election, every stage of the processes leading to the sham coronation was staged managed and biased to produce the sham outcome in the just coronation by the kingmakers at NBA house. So sad.

Chief Jibrin Samuel Okutepa, SAN

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My dear Professor, your graciousness does you honour, and your modesty fools nobody. A man who has taught medicine for sixty years understands implementation better than most lawyers ever will, because medicine is the one profession where the gap between the prescription and the cure is measured in lives. Your old professor’s saying, that eighty percent of any idea is implementation, is not a small complaint about my article. It is the right test, and I accept it completely. So let me answer you through it.

First, let me record how much ground we now share. You agree the present system has failed. You agree reform is necessary. And you have graciously accepted that regional police would need a regional government that does not exist. So only one question now stands between us: will the safeguards in the bill actually restrain power in real life, and not just on paper? That is a serious question, and here is my serious answer.

Read Also: ‘Protection Without a Protector Is No Protection’: Prof. Scott-Emuakpor replies Atake, SAN again on state police

Read Also: AFTER THE RESCUE (PART IV C): The victory that changed the conversation

YOUR TEST IS MY STARTING POINT, NOT MY WEAKNESS

My article’s whole argument rested on the very phrase you quote: that the reform’s worth depends on how carefully it is designed. That is an implementation statement. The bill is not a slogan about moving power to the States. It is an attempt to design the enforcement itself: national standards, certification, filtered appointments, confirmations, prohibitions, a federal trigger, ratification by the National Assembly. You may say the design can fail. Of course it can.

But look where your objection leads if we treat it as a veto. No law enforces itself. No court order carries itself out. No constitution, no electoral law, no anticorruption statute works without willing hands. If the possibility of failed enforcement is enough to stop a reform, it stops every reform, including every alternative you list, and it stops constitutional government itself.

You know this from your own science. No doctor refuses to operate on a dying patient because recovery will depend on nursing, drugs and follow up that may fail. The doctor operates, writes the protocol, monitors, and adjusts. Nigeria is the dying patient. The question is not whether the protocol can fail. It is whether the protocol, even imperfectly followed, gives the patient a better chance than the disease.

THE “SAME POLITICIANS” POINT CUTS BOTH WAYS

You say the same political class that weakened our national institutions will build the State ones. True. But that same class runs the present system too. An objection that condemns both systems equally cannot help us choose between them. What can help us choose is structure: which system makes responsibility visible, which one multiplies the checks, and which one keeps failure local instead of national. On all three, the decentralised design wins, as I will show.

I NEVER OFFERED NEARNESS ALONE

You are right that nearness guarantees nothing, and that local strongmen can capture local institutions. But the article never offered nearness by itself. It offered nearness plus accountability plus design. And consider two things. First, in vast parts of Nigeria today the problem is not a nearby force that lacks the will to act. It is that there is no force there at all. Will cannot act through officers who are not present. Second, the strongman you fear already captures policing under the present system. He simply procures the cooperation of a force his governor does not own, and everybody involved can deny responsibility.

When a known criminal walks free today, who answers? The governor says the police are not his. The President is too far away to blame. Ownership ends that excuse. When a State force ignores a known criminal, every citizen will know exactly whose government failed, and can punish it at the next election. Political will is not a fixed quality of character. It follows responsibility. Today, responsibility has no address. The reform gives it one.

COUNT HOW MANY MUST FAIL

Here is the heart of my answer to your deepest point. You say commissions can be captured, certification can become a rubber stamp, prohibitions can be ignored, and protectors can be politically compromised. Each of these is possible. Now count. For abuse to run unchecked under the reform, the governor must act, his Assembly must go along, the Police Council must look away, the certifying authority must fail to withdraw certification, the federal government must refuse to use its trigger, the National Assembly must stay silent, the courts must fail, 35 other States must watch and say nothing, and the voters must forgive it all. Under the present system, how many must fail? One. The centre.

That is how engineers deal with unreliable parts: they build in many independent checks, so that disaster requires many failures at the same time. No single safeguard is fully trustworthy. The design does not pretend otherwise. It simply ensures that abuse needs many failures at once, while the system we have now needs only one.

And your strongest scenario, a President whose party controls the federal government and most States, so that he never intervenes against a friendly governor, deserves an honest reply: that scenario condemns the present system far more than the bill. Today, that same President already commands, through one Inspector General, the only police force in every State of Nigeria, including the opposition States. The nightmare of fully aligned, politically directed policing is not a risk the reform creates. It is the standing possibility of the system we live under right now. Under the reform, even a completely captured centre does not command the police of Lagos or Adamawa in ordinary times.

THE PROTECTOR YOU LEFT OUT

You ask, rightly, who the reliable protector is. Let me name the one your analysis leaves out: the citizen at the ballot box. The vote is the one enforcement tool that does not depend on officials policing themselves. But the vote can only punish what it can see, and today no elected official in Nigeria can be voted out over policing, because none of them commands it. The reform is what finally puts the ultimate protector to work. A governor who owns his police force answers for it every four years to the very people that force polices. That is not protection on paper. That is the oldest protection democracy has.

WHY THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION COMPARISON FINALLY BREAKS

Your point about the State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs) taught us where safeguards fail, and I took it seriously. But push it one step further and it breaks, on your own chosen ground: incentives. For an electoral commission, partisan failure is the reward. The governor’s party wins precisely when the commission does its main job badly. The incentive and the abuse are the same thing. Policing is different. A governor’s political survival is served by security succeeding, because voters measure safety in their own daily lives, in the kidnappings that stop and the roads that become safe again. So the main incentive pushes toward performance.

Abuse is a temptation at the edges, and the edges are exactly where the bill posts its guards: the ban on political deployment, the certification, the federal trigger, the courts. Where incentives run in the same direction as the safeguards, safeguards hold far more often. By your own logic, State Police is a much better bet than the electoral commissions ever were.

THIRTY SIX EXPERIMENTS, NOT THIRTY SIX TIME BOMBS

You say spreading power may spread the opportunities for abuse. It also spreads the opportunities for excellence, and it changes the arithmetic of failure. Under one force, one failure is a national failure. There is nothing to compare it with, nowhere to take refuge, no example to copy. Under 36 forces, failure is local and can be contained, while success is visible and spreads. Our political culture is not the same everywhere. Some States are governed clearly better than others. A single national system chains every Nigerian to the average. Decentralisation frees the best States to show what is possible, and shames the worst by comparison. That is how federations learn.

YOUR ALTERNATIVES FACE YOUR OWN OBJECTION

You suggest community policing, operational independence, better funding, judicial oversight, and decentralisation within a national framework. I welcome every one of them, and I note two things gently. First, each of them depends on exactly the same fragile institutions and willing hands as the bill does. Your implementation objection hits them with equal force, so it cannot be a reason to prefer them. Second, most of them have been urged, and tried, inside the present unitary system for decades, and they all ran into the same wall: the constitutional monopoly of one force. They belong alongside the reform, not in place of it. And your own instinct about raising the quality of the officer, better recruitment and better training, lives inside the bill’s national minimum standards, which is the very instrument through which such things can be made compulsory.

YOUR PRAYER ABOUT DELTA AND EDO IS ALREADY WRITTEN INTO THE BILL

Your closing worry, that neighbouring forces will fight over jurisdiction, is real, and my article faced it directly as the problem of two captains in one theatre. But note the bill’s own answer. Any crime that crosses a State line is, by design, a federal matter: the Federal Police lead, and the State forces are bound to cooperate. So the moment your Delta and Edo scenario arises, it already belongs to the federal tier.

Beneath that, the Nigeria Police Council, on which the States themselves sit, is the standing forum for settling rules of primacy and coordination, and the enabling laws can and should spell out rules for hot pursuit, information sharing and joint operations. This is not unknown territory. The United States has run about 18,000 police agencies side by side for over a century, and boundary questions are handled through settled arrangements of mutual help, not turf wars. The seam between two forces is a problem with known solutions. The absence of any force is a problem with none.

PRUDENCE BELONGS AT THE DRAFTING TABLE

You are right that urgency is not proof, and I never offered the bill’s speed as proof of its merit. My point was about the burden of proof. The centralised system has had the field entirely to itself since 1972, more than half a century, and its results are before our eyes, on your own finding. After a trial that long, to demand that the alternative prove itself in advance, something no constitutional reform in history could ever do, is to make the proven failure our permanent default. And let me withdraw any suggestion that your concerns amount to doing nothing. They do not. They are the test sheet against which the standards, the certification criteria and the coordination rules must now be written. Prudence is not opposition to reform; on that we agree. But prudence’s proper seat is at the drafting table, not the doorway.

IN CLOSING

You say you did not recommend a remedy, and you ask who you are to try. Permit me to disagree with you one last time. You have recommended the most important remedy of all: the insistence that enforcement must be designed, and never assumed. That insistence should follow this reform through every clause, every standard and every protocol, and I invite you to keep holding our feet to that fire

Between your caution and my conviction lies, I suspect, the version of State Police that will actually work. Medicine and law meet at the same bedside in the end, Professor. The patient is failing under the current treatment. We do not withhold the operation because recovery will demand vigilance. We operate, and then we keep watch together.

With respect and warm regards,
Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)

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Wow! Oga Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Dr. Eyimofe Atake. Small small deal with me now!! I never knew that you would ever see my small complaint about your well-presented academic article. I am a simple teacher of medicine, with no formal knowledge of politics or law or even social sciences. Please don’t take me too seriously.

Over 60 years ago when I was in Graduate school, my professor told me something that I have never forgotten. He said, “Eighty percent of any idea is IMPLEMENTATION”. It is from that viewpoint that I responded.

Your argument rests heavily on the phrase “if carefully designed,” but that is precisely where many of us remain unconvinced. Institutions do not design themselves; they are created, funded, supervised, and often manipulated by the same political class whose record has inspired public distrust in the first place. Merely relocating power from the center to the states does not automatically produce accountability or effectiveness.

Read Also: A Reply to Professor Ajovi Scott-Emuakpor on State Police, in Plain Terms

Experience suggests that proximity alone is not a guarantee of good governance. We have repeatedly seen situations where those closest to the people—local politicians, traditional power brokers, and influential community figures—have used that proximity not to protect citizens but to intimidate them. The local strongman often enjoys greater influence over local institutions than an ordinary citizen does.

In such circumstances, “local knowledge” may simply mean that the authorities know exactly who the troublemakers are and choose not to act because of political, ethnic, family, or financial connections.
Likewise, the assumption that nearness leads to quicker response is not borne out by experience.

Many communities have witnessed local acts of violence, intimidation, land grabbing, election-related thuggery, and organized criminality continue for years despite the perpetrators being widely known. The problem has not been lack of local knowledge; it has been lack of political will and institutional independence.

Therefore, the real question is not whether a centralized system has failed—it clearly has significant shortcomings. The question is whether state-controlled institutions would be sufficiently insulated from local political pressures to perform better. Without strong safeguards, independent oversight, transparent recruitment, professional command structures, and meaningful consequences for abuse, state-level control may simply replace one form of failure with another.

The choice is not between a failed federal system and a potentially successful local system. The choice is between two systems that can both fail if placed in the hands of unaccountable political actors. Before assuming that decentralization will solve the problem, proponents must explain why the same political culture that has weakened national institutions would suddenly produce stronger and more accountable institutions at the state level.

In short, the concern is not whether local systems can work. The concern is whether our current political reality provides sufficient reason to believe they will work better than what already exists. Until that question is convincingly answered, skepticism remains entirely reasonable.
The argument is persuasive in acknowledging the abuses of the First Republic police and in rejecting the simplistic claim that centralisation automatically solves political interference. However, it understates the force of the historical objection and places considerable faith in safeguards whose effectiveness remains unproven in practice.

First, the fact that abuse continued after centralisation does not necessarily support the conclusion that “history does not condemn the States as a location.” The historical record may instead suggest that the dangers are multiplied when policing authority is fragmented among numerous political actors. While centralisation did not eliminate abuse, it reduced the number of centres from which partisan interference could originate. The burden therefore falls on proponents of state police to demonstrate not merely that safeguards exist on paper, but that they can withstand intense local political pressures.

Second, the comparison with the First Republic may not be as straightforward as presented. It is true that the local forces of the 1960s lacked many of the institutional protections now proposed. Yet safeguards are only as effective as the institutions that enforce them. Independent commissions can be captured, certification requirements can become formalities, and prohibitions on political deployment can be ignored if accountability mechanisms are weak. Many countries possess elaborate legal protections against police misuse while still experiencing significant political interference in practice.

Third, the assertion assumes that federal oversight will reliably correct state-level abuses. That assumption deserves scrutiny. If a federal government is unwilling or unable to intervene against politically connected governors, the safeguard becomes largely symbolic. Conversely, if federal intervention is exercised aggressively, it could undermine the very autonomy that state policing is intended to provide.

Finally, the argument risks presenting a false choice between preserving the current system and embracing state police with safeguards. Critics may accept that the present arrangement is imperfect while still maintaining that alternative reforms—such as stronger community policing, greater operational independence, improved funding, judicial oversight, or decentralisation within a national framework—pose fewer risks than creating state-controlled police forces.

In short, history may indeed “warn the designer rather than sentence the nation to remain as it is,” but the warning is more severe than the assertion admits. The central question is not whether safeguards can be written into a bill, but whether they can realistically restrain powerful political actors when those safeguards are most needed. Until that question is convincingly answered, historical experience remains a substantial argument for caution.

The lesson of SIECs is not simply that they lacked safeguards; it is that formal safeguards often fail when political incentives run in the opposite direction. National standards, certification requirements, legislative confirmations, and federal intervention all depend on institutions that may themselves be vulnerable to political influence. The bill’s protections therefore address the legal problem but not necessarily the political problem. Since police powers are uniquely coercive, proponents of state police must show not merely that safeguards exist on paper, but that they can reliably restrain governors in practice. Until that is demonstrated, the SIEC analogy remains a powerful warning rather than a lesson already learned.

The argument places too much confidence in formal safeguards and too little attention on the reality that institutions are only as strong as the people who operate them. National standards, certification, courts, and federal intervention sound reassuring, but they work only when officials are willing and able to enforce them impartially. Nigeria’s experience shows that institutions can be captured, ignored, or manipulated by powerful political actors.

The claim that a governor who abuses his force “will meet the centre” assumes that the centre will act. But what if the federal government is politically aligned with the governor, or is itself unwilling to enforce the rules? The safeguard then becomes theoretical.

More fundamentally, the argument assumes that dispersing power automatically creates accountability. It may instead disperse opportunities for abuse. Creating 36 police forces means placing coercive power in the hands of 36 political executives in a system where institutions are often fragile and constraints are unevenly enforced.

The real lesson is that laws do not restrain power by themselves. People and institutions do. If those institutions are weak, then multiplying centres of power may multiply opportunities for abuse rather than checks on abuse. The question is not whether safeguards exist on paper, but whether they will hold when powerful actors decide to ignore them.

The argument depends on a protector, but it never convincingly identifies one. It says the President can intervene against an abusive governor, while the National Assembly and the courts provide oversight. Yet this assumes those institutions are sufficiently independent and willing to act. That is precisely the concern. Institutions are fragile; they work only when people obey the constraints and respect the rules.

“Protection without a protector is not a position.” True. But neither is protection that relies on protectors who may themselves be politically captured. If the President’s party controls both the federal government and most state governments, why should citizens assume intervention will occur against a politically aligned governor? If the National Assembly is dominated by the ruling party and opposition voices continue to diminish, its approval cannot be treated as an automatic safeguard.
The flaw in the argument is that it treats legal checks as self-executing. They are not. A takeover power is only as effective as the independence of those who exercise and supervise it. In a system where institutions are weak and political loyalties often outweigh constitutional restraints, the real question is not whether a protector exists on paper, but whether that protector can be trusted to act when it matters most.

I am not a constitutional lawyer, but I find this argument persuasive. A police force must be accountable to a clearly defined government with identifiable legal authority, funding, and responsibility. The proposal for regional police appears to raise more questions than it answers: Who controls the force? Who appoints its leadership? Which legislature exercises oversight? And who is ultimately accountable when things go wrong?

What I find most convincing is the point about responsibility. Security works best when authority and accountability are clearly located. If six governors share control of a regional force, there is a real risk that responsibility becomes blurred and decisions become politicized or delayed. In that sense, a regional police structure could create the very problem it is intended to solve—power that is diffused enough to avoid accountability, but concentrated enough to cause confusion.

For those reasons, I agree that a regional police force would require a regional government framework to function effectively. Without that, the chain of command and democratic accountability remain unclear.

The argument overstates its case by treating urgency as proof. The fact that a bill is moving through the National Assembly does not make it the right solution. More importantly, it assumes that safeguards, federal triggers, and oversight mechanisms will work as intended. Yet institutions are fragile; they only work when those in power respect and enforce them.

The central question is not whether the current system has failed—many, including this writer, agree that it has. The question is whether state police will be constrained when governors choose to ignore the rules. A reform cannot be judged solely against the failures of the present system; it must also be judged against the risks it creates. Calling concerns about those risks “doing nothing” avoids rather than answers them.

I also thank the legal luminary, Dr. Atake, for his engagement. We agree that Nigeria’s security architecture is failing and that reform is necessary. Where we differ is in our confidence that legal safeguards, however carefully drafted, can restrain political power in practice. Institutions are not self-executing. They work only when those entrusted with enforcing them are willing and able to do so.
That is why my concern remains. The debate is not simply about the design of State Police on paper, but about whether the institutions meant to check abuse are strong enough to withstand the pressures of real politics. Protection without a reliable protector is no protection at all.

The case for reform is strong, but the case for entrusting coercive police powers to governors in a system of fragile institutions remains unproven. Prudence is not opposition to reform. It is a recognition that, in matters of state power, the hardest question is not what the law says, but who will enforce it when it matters most.

Why am I praying that, whenever the State Police arrangement becomes operational, Delta Police and Edo Police OR Edo Police and Ondo Police, OR Oyo Police and Ogun Police, etc, will not engage constantly in struggle for jurisdiction. State demarcations are fragile, as far as I know. Let not the perceived solution to one problem be the beginning of unintended conflicts.

I HOPE YOU NOTICE THAT I DID NOT RECOMMEND A REMEDY. WHO AM I TO TRY?
Ajovi

Professor Ajovi Scott-Emuakpor writes from Michigan State University.

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By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

The history of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) has traveled a path that parallels the political evolution of the country. It began in 1900, the same year in which the government of Queen Victoria assumed formal authority over the country after revoking the Royal Charter of Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company.

For the next 59 years, leadership of the NBA was a lifetime preferment. Christopher Sapara Williams became Nigeria’s first lawyer in 1888. 12 years later, he emerged as the first Chairman of the national bar. Sapara Williams served in that role until his untimely death in 1915. His successor was acclaimed colonial collaborator, Sir Kitoyi Ajasa. Like Sapara Williams, Sir Kitoyi served until his death in 1937. He holds the record as the longest serving national leader of the NBA.

Olawolu Eric Moore succeeded to the role until his death in 1944. Eric James Alex Taylor – whose son, John Idowu Conrad, would later become the founding Chief Justice of Lagos – followed and died in that position in 1950. His successor, Adeyemo Alakija did the same in 1952. Alhaji Jubril Martins, the sixth chairman of Nigeria’s national bar died in June 1959.

The emergence of Frederick Rotimi Alade Williams as the first President of the NBA coincided with the arrival of independence in 1960. With a tenure that lasted until 1968, Chief Williams is the longest-serving president in the history of the association. Since the three-year tenure of Richard Akinjide from 1970-1973, no president of the association has held office for more than two years.

In the tradition of the NBA, it is assumed that the association invests the president with authority. Occasionally, the weight of the association has been advanced by the authority of a charismatic president with moral authority. One example was the presidency of Alao Aka Basorun during the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida from 1987 to 1989. Olisa Agbakoba arguably did the same from 2006 to 2008 in the fraught transition from the administration of Olusegun Obasanjo to the flawed mandate of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

Since 1960, the NBA has had 32 presidents. In the third week of July 2026, the association will elect its 33rd president. The mission of the president of the association is encapsulated in its motto: “promoting the rule of law.” Yet, from its very beginning, this has been a fraught mission.

The first two leaders of the NBA illustrate two different ideological pathways that have framed the mission of the association. Sapara Williams was regarded as radical, with a reputation for confronting white arrogance. He defended the rights of natives, argued for freedom of expression and was the father of “restructuring.” In 1904, he reportedly proposed to Lugard that “the present boundary between the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria and the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria be readjusted by bringing the southern portion into Southern Nigeria, so that the entire tribes of the Yoruba-speaking people should be under one and the same administration.”

By contrast, his successor, Kitoyi Ajasa, made his career as a collaborationist in the colonial subjugation of natives. A close confidante of founding Governor-General, Frederick Lugard, Sir Kitoyi was also seven-time Worshipful Master of the Lagos (Masonic) Lodge No. 1171 between 1901 and 1928.

These themes of confrontation and collaboration have been durable in the politics of the NBA to the present day. As the country’s political economy has evolved and the demographics and reach of the bar have ramified, the factors that now define leadership at the Nigerian Bar and its orientation have also adapted, presenting the association with a third possibility – pragmatism.

In 2016, the association re-designed its leadership selection processes in three ways that are somewhat in tension with one another. One was the introduction of universal suffrage. The second was the emergence of ethno-tribal politics in the NBA. The third was the introduction of digital balloting. There is a fourth issue which is the role of money in leadership selection in the association. A fifth is the role of outside interests and politically-exposed persons. These five issues will require attention in the years ahead if the NBA is to retain both relevance and salience in the country’s affairs. It is useful to advert to each briefly.

First, the replacement of the much-maligned delegate system with universal suffrage privileges the young lawyers among whose population the most votes lie. The goal was to force senior lawyers to take a lot more seriously their obligations to the younger lawyers in the knowledge that if they do not, their ambitions could get punished through rejection by the younger lawyers. The exponential growth in the population of lawyers in the country creates a need to improve data management capabilities. The association has made progress, but it still has considerable room for improvement.

Second, the NBA formalized the rotation of its most important positions across the three original regions of the country. In the short-hand of Nigerian politics, this is known as “zoning”. At its best, it is an acknowledgement of the ethnic diversity of the country. At its worst, it is a genuflection before the gods of grubby ethno-tribal politics. The original design is that while ethnic cabals may be needed to bless leadership ambitions, those have to ultimately be acceptable to a broad majority of the  membership of the association in order to succeed. In the contest for the leadership in #NBADecides2026, one candidate turned this engineering of political convention into a destructive weapon of political entitlement with backing from forces who inveigled the Attorney-General of the Federation into endorsing this in principle. It took the Court of Appeal to – momentarily – save the day.

Third, the migration of balloting to digital platforms has created its own problems. The twin bugs of energy and bandwidth hunger have sustained a deficit of belief in the integrity and administration of the NBA’s election systems. In successive cycles since 2018, voting has been afflicted by growing allegations of cyberattacks. In the latest cycle, voting had to be delayed by over seven hours because of what the Electoral Committee of the NBA (ECNBA) called “a coordinated cyberattack on its electronic voting platform.” This cannot be condemned too seriously but it was entirely foreseeable and reveals a failure of adequate stress-testing and firewalling ahead of the balloting. The organs of the NBA have a duty to now institutionalise effective and transparent post-ballot forensics in order to adapt ballot administration to the rapid changes in digital capabilities. It seems clear that this will be a site of vigorous contest in the aftermath of the current ballot.

Fourth, since at least 2014, the contest for leadership of Nigeria’s legal profession has become a liquidity derby. In that year, expenditure on the campaign for the presidency of the association broke the one billion Naira barrier. It has been on the rise since then. The pay-off is significant because the NBA is a multi-billionaire organization and its leader commands real powers of both access and patronage.

But the result is also that the candidates have to raise campaign funds from sources outside the association. In many cases, this puts them in hock to politically exposed persons (PEPs) who control the largest war chests in Nigeria. The accompanying bargains, even when implicit, can undermine the commitment of the association to “promoting the rule of law.” The responsibility to rein in this runaway inflation in the costs of associational politics in the NBA belongs to the ECNBA. A succession of leaders of the electoral umpire have, however, capitulated on this issue. That must change.

The road to the ballot in #NBADecides2026 has encountered more obstacles than a demolition derby. The contest is unlikely to end with the announcement of a winner on 19 July 2026. It is well possible that the outcome will return to the courts yet again. Howsoever it ends, the association must confront with bold transparency the duty to continuously improve the administration of its leadership processes. It must also understand that failure to do so will endanger its commitment to promoting the rule of law. This is not an option as the country confronts a bumpy election year in 2027.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected] 

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

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