NBA ELECTIONS: THE IMPERATIVES FOR REFORM

NBA ELECTIONS: THE IMPERATIVES FOR REFORM

PREAMBLE

If the Nigerian Bar Association does nothing else, it must reform its electoral process. If Augustine Alegeh, SAN does nothing else as NBA President, he must do one thing; help reform the NBA electoral process. Mrs. Olufunke Adekoya SAN wanted to do it and she must do it for as a respected member of both the outer and later the inner bar she has the influence, passion, knowledge and the necessary know how to get it done, all be it from the side lines now.

I do not believe that it is possible to consistently err on the part of wrong. If it is not deliberate, you will occasionally err on the part of truth. The NBA has consistently refused to reform its electoral process not because it is wrong to do so, or that it can not do so or that it does not realize that it is right to do so but it is simply that it does not want to do so.

Why is this so? Why is the NBA so obdurate in its refusal to reform its electoral process? The answer is simple if you ask me: it is because we want to continue to cheat, we want to continue to do injustice, we want to continue to corrupt our members, we want to continue to do the same things we know are wrong with our national politics and our electoral system. All so a particular kind of President will emerge!!!

“This process cannot produce the best candidate” I heard from people severally and I believe it is true but I will say as the former American President, James Garfield said, “all free Governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people”. That is to say and it means that democracy can and may not produce the best. When the combined wisdom of the people prevails, they elect the best candidate, when the combined folly of the people prevails, they elect any candidate but the best.

For me though, it is not about the best candidate, for what are the criteria for measuring the best after all? It is about the right candidate and it should rightly be so. And you may want to know what I mean by the right candidate? The right candidate is the one who would have won the election if every Nigerian lawyer had the opportunity to vote. He may or may not be the best, but we would have elected the candidate by popular choice and we can all then swim or sink with him. 

The Nigerian Bar Association’s two yearly election ritual in the nation’s capital, Abuja, where national officers of the association are elected has come and gone and this year’s edition was not any less eventful as has become customary with any gathering of one of the largest, dynamic and intriguing bar anywhere in the world. Those who won are savoring their victory, those who did not win are moving on with life and probably licking their wounds or strategizing to use this experience as a stepping stone towards greater things.

For me personally all this is good but something is not quite right and it is fundamental. The NBA as a leading professional association in Nigeria and probably in Africa ought to know and should know better. I will not belabor you with rhetoric but I will quickly identify and highlight the points I think the NBA knows which well considered should spur the NBA into action as it should become clear that the reform of its electoral process is a moral, constitutional, political, social and economic imperative.

THE RIGHT TO BE HEARD

Firstly, from time immemorial the world and its peoples struggled to be heard at the risk of being silenced forever by those who do not want them to be heard. Ultimately the world came to realize, understood and accepted that one of the greatest ideals of men are to be heard, to be allowed freedom of choice, and to be left alone should they chose solitude. Does the delegate electoral process the NBA has adopted assures this? It does not.

FREEDOM AND LIBERTY OF CHOICE

Secondly, man desires freedom and liberty and it is right that man has freedom and liberty. The 1960 Independence Constitution, the 1963 Republican Constitution, the 1979 Third Republican Constitution, even the stillborn or abrogated 1989 Constitution, the 1999 Constitution guaranteed the chequered rights to freedom and liberty. Does the NBA delegate electoral process allow every Nigerian lawyer who wills the freedom and liberty to choose the man who will lead him? No, it does not.

GUARANTEE OF VOTERS RIGHT

Thirdly, a polity must guarantee the right to vote and be voted for in any election and the votes should count. The world has also recognized that the best way to guarantee this is through a universal adult suffrage and every self respecting Constitution recognizes and guarantees this. Now this is interesting; the subject of universal adult suffrage that is. Even many Western epitome of democracy today did not allow universal adult suffrage until the second part of the 20^th Century.

It seems unfathomable now but even in the United States, universal adult suffrage was only achieved in the latter part of the last Century due largely to the agitations of civil rights groups, led by the prominent African, American Baptist Minister, Martin Luther King Jr. and thanks to the empathy of the young, charismatic Irish Catholic President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) who determined that the part of civil rights assurance and especially universal adult suffrage was the way to go for America. What did the American’s fear? See apartheid South Africa too!!! So I ask what does the NBA fear? Why can’t the NBA allow everyone who has paid his dues and meet the requirement to vote cast his vote in his local branch and then the result is collated and sent to the national body. Put in another way, does the delegates electoral process of the NBA guarantee the right of every Nigerian Lawyer to vote? Yet again, it does not.

FAIRNESS AND TRANSPARENCY

Fourthly, people deserve to choose their leaders in a fair and transparent manner. I do not subscribe to the populist believe that democracy guarantees the best will emerge even where it is properly adhered to. Let no one kid us, Barack Obama was not the best America could offer when he was elected President. But then he was elected President from a clear, transparent, best and edifying process that worked in an epochal manner and all shades of opinion accepted the outcome.

To start with; because of the delegates system we adopt, mushroom branches are created at the dawn of every election year to skew the dynamics in favor of one candidate or the other; as many people as the NBA President want are co-opted into NEC so they will vote for the favored candidate; the branch Chair persons of the 109 branches of the NBA has complete discretion on how and who to choose as delegates and they will choose only those who will vote for their anointed candidate. In fact, many chair persons are still at loggerheads with members of their branches over what some call corruptly manipulated and unknown lawyers delegates list. Now whither the fairness and transparency in the NBA delegates electoral process? None yet again unfortunately. Haba, this process must be reformed.

COST AND EXPENSE

Fifthly, I worry about cost and expense. Why should the cost of winning the Presidency of a professional association be so prohibitive? Why should it be that a man must belong to a select group of lawyers to be elected NBA President as it has become now. Why is it that a discretionary title that does not prove you are better than anyone be the basis, the starting point even, if you will seek to lead your professional association? As in national politics, the trend in our elections in the last few years shows that whoever will aspire to be the NBA President must either have very deep pockets or have sponsors who do. He may possess no leadership qualities and this way, he does not and most times will not deliver on his electoral mandate because there is no incentive to do so. Infact the only incentive is to mortgage the association to his sponsors or the powers that be. All this because of the flawed delegates electoral process the NBA has adopted!!!

Still on cost and expense, no one should lose sight of the fact that every election year, we gather again after a few weeks to hold the Annual General Conference of the NBA in probably another far flung corner of Nigeria where heavy expenses are incurred again by members of the association on travel, hotel and maintenance costs for one long week whilst the AGC lasts. This is not discountenancing the logistics; risk and insecurity involved taking into consideration the peculiar circumstances of our country today.

RISK AND INSECURITY

Sixthly, we do not seem to appreciate the severity of the attendant risk when we ask every delegate to come to Abuja to elect the President of the NBA. Why should all the delegates go to Abuja? These things can be better done and we know it. The question is why do we refuse to do them? In the 21^st Century, Lawyers, elites in Society have refused to embrace and take advantage of technology. The NBA ought to be interested in how the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators United Kingdom, an eminent body with membership all over the world, elects its officers – that is if it does not already even know. Why should the NBA ask its best to come to the nation’s capital every two years for the mundane exercise of electing national officers on roads that are death traps, in an era where planes are falling off our skies and in a nation where boko haram and all manner of pocket and closet terrorists are having a free reign/field day? Again, we must reform this delegates electoral process of ours before tragedy strikes.

CORRUPTION AND INDISCIPLINE

Seventh point, Corruption and indiscipline will destroy us as a profession and as a nation. Many branch Delegates came to Abuja. I understand they got Hotel rooms from the candidates they supposedly supported (whether they stayed in those rooms is a moot point) and they got Hotel rooms from every other candidate if they will. Many got money to pay for hotel rooms they did not need and did not take. We cry corruption in our national life everyday and we do this in a professional association? We are the ones, the one segment of society by virtue of our learning and experience who ought to and should understand that corruption destroys all of us, but we do not seem to care. May be we do not mind if we die or live.

Again, the delegates electoral process fuels and encourages this level of corruption and indiscipline.

ZONING (THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM)

Eight point, Zoning? Really, how sad!!! We are not a serious people at all. We seem to emphasize our differences and deemphasize that which unites us. Zoning might well be right where we are sincere with what we profess. But here we are not. I have canvassed elsewhere during the run up to the 2008 election that it is all motion without movement. In an interview with the nation newspaper, I told the world that it was not right to follow the trend in national politics in a professional association. What example are we setting? The right man cannot emerge in such circumstances. But as usual, who listened? No one!!!

What does zoning now mean in the context of national politics and at the level of the NBA? Zoning really means if by the collective folly of the people, they elected the wrong candidate, they cannot by their collective wisdom change and elect the right candidate next election as they must wait till the time when it is the turn of the obvious right candidate’s Zone to produce the President, at which time the candidate may have moved on, may be too old for the rigours required, may have lost interest or died even. Many at times I wonder and it baffles me how and why we seem bent on importing everything wrong with our national life into the NBA.

NIGERIAN WOMEN AND POLITICS

Ninth point, I will never understand our women? This is a familiar theme. Women are by nature not necessarily like men and even by experience and disposition, the idiosyncrasies of the male Homo sapiens is likely to be different from that of his female ilk. That said; Nigerian women do not seem to appreciate their place in history. I do not know how many female delegates were at the NBA elections in Abuja. I imagine if all the female delegates alone voted for the female candidate, she would have won the elections no doubt. Today they cry feminism, tomorrow they cry female emancipation and as we speak they want affirmative action and worst of all they want the men to do it for them. Women for the most part are the ones who told me that the female candidate is the best. “But” they will always add. Trust me, I always ask them “what is but?” The answer I got? Your guess is as good as mine. Needless to say what they said.

Women do not love themselves. If they do, they will not be where they are. Cue Sarah Jubril. Remember this woman wanted to be President of Nigeria under the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party. She had so many female supporters and going into the primary elections in 2011 at the Eagle Square in Abuja, she thought Nigerian women were sweet on her. What happened? She got only one vote. As it turned out, she only voted for herself eventually. One wonders what became of the many women groups, the many women states delegates and even her female benefactors who made it seem they were all for her? Tough women’s world you know!!!

Bottom line, women are their own worst enemy, they do not love themselves and they do not want anything enough. But even at that, I believe that if the NBA allows all women to vote in their local branches instead of the delegates process that obtains right now then the women might well have the freedom and opportunity to cast votes that can bring about a seismic change in NBA elections. The atmosphere in Abuja is too chauvinistic and suffocating for women to make a collective choice in their enlightened self interest. In Abuja they can be easily swayed, canvassed, convinced, intimidated if need be and finally corrupted to abandon a women’s common cause, if and in the event there was one anyway. At their local branches, no such incentives can be offered and therefore the likelihood is close to nil that the women will vote against their conscience.

REFORM THE ELECTORAL PROCESS NOW

Tenth point, reform the electoral process now and be damned. I have heard that Austin Alegeh SAN, the man who eventually won the elections, the newly minted NBA President promised to do so and that he will propose that to NEC. All that is great and I am glad that a President of our august body has finally caught the electoral reform fire that many of us have always canvassed and in this respect I reserve a special place of gratitude and respect for the erudite Professor Chidi Odinkalu and Mrs. Funke Adekoya, SAN, two people I know, who have tirelessly advocated a reform of the electoral process of the NBA.

But I must hasten to add that I have also heard that the new President will take away with the left hand what he wants us to believe he is giving and willing to give to us with the right hand as he will recruit an army of NEC members who will in a subterranean manner ensure that the motion will not carry and thus the circus show that is right now the delegates electoral process will continue. I do not know how informed these sources are, but I hope and pray that they are proved wrong and that the electoral process is reformed and the delegates charade retired into the doldrums.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, these are the ten points I gleaned from the soul searching I have done on this issue since that day in 2008, when because the position of the NBA President was zoned to the South West, the leaders of the bar in the South West prevailed on other candidates to step down for the man who became the NBA President at the time and from my personal experiences at the just concluded 2014 elections in Abuja.

As we have seen, the NBA delegates electoral process does not allow all Nigerian lawyers the right to be heard, it does not allow them the freedom and liberty of choice, it does not guarantee their right to vote, there is no fairness and transparency in the process, there is too cost and expense involved, the security risks are just too great, corruption and indiscipline has crept into the process, hence the imperative urgency of reforms.

Whatever we, members of the NBA wants to do, whatever else the President of the NBA wants to do, reform the electoral process we and he must as the circumstances and the realities today is that it has become imperative that the process be reformed if we ever hope to elect the right candidate to lead us again. I look forward to the year 2016 and the elections of that year which will be conducted in the 109 branches (or more) of the NBA, collated and sent to the national body and the NBA President that will emerge from such a free, transparent, democratic, fair process, with the legitimate mandate of all Nigerian lawyers.

In short, I look forward to an election that will be everything the present delegates process is not.

I rest my case.

Stephen O. Obajaja Esq. is a Partner at the Lagos Law Firm of Fountain Court Partners.

STEPHEN O. OBAJAJA

Fountain Court Partners

Block 36B, LSPDC Estate

Ogudu Road

Ojota – Lagos.

08098066172.

LAW: THE PROFESSION OF FREE MEN

LAW: THE PROFESSION OF FREE MEN

“I became a Lawyer and I love this work. Most important, it gave me the reassurance and the certainty of having a job to fall back on. Without that, I would never have been able to take the risks that I have taken throughout my career. I owe to this profession the independence I’ve needed to remain a free man. It is so much easier to say no when you know your professional future is secure”. – Nicholas Sarkozy.

“I became a Lawyer and I love this work. Most important, it gave me the reassurance and the certainty of having a job to fall back on. Without that, I would never have been able to take the risks that I have taken throughout my career. I owe to this profession the independence I’ve needed to remain a free man. It is so much easier to say no when you know your professional future is secure”, wrote erstwhile French President, Nicholas Sarkozy in “Testimony”, the book he penned shortly after he was elected President of France in 2007.

I am a Lawyer and I know of no other profession that gives you so much opportunity to be what you are and whatever it is you want to be.  “There is no jewel in the world comparable to learning, no learning so excellent both for princes and subject, as knowledge of law and no knowledge of any laws (especially human law) so necessary for all estates and for all causes concerning goods, lands or life, as the common laws of England” wrote the Preface to Lord Coke’s Report. 

“There is little doubt that society expects lawyers to be leaders and gives them countless opportunities to serve in that capacity” Judge Wiley Y. Daniel of the U.S District Court, Colorado further opined.

If lawyers will be leaders and if they will provide the level of quality leadership expected of them, then there is nothing they need more than the excellent learning Lord Coke’s Preface recommended and the time and freedom to pursue both learning and advancement in politics and in the service of their country. The experience of Nicholas Sarkozy reinforces what I always knew – that anyone who will lead properly and take risks in politics needs the assurance and certainty of a job to fall back on if they failed. This profession of Law adequately offers that. It affords you the independence you need to remain a free man as you walk your way in politics and in the service of your country.

There is something about the profession of law and leadership. Many of the world’s greatest leaders have been lawyers and many still thriving leaders are Lawyers. The United States is considered the greatest Government and system of laws man ever devised/knew and still knows. It is a prime example of the opportunities the law affords you to lead and the sheer volume of great Lawyer leaders that system has produced over two hundred years self validates this argument. At the last count, amazingly 26 of the 44 great men who have led America were and are lawyers, learned, successful and steeped in the traditions of the law. Infact, of the first Eight Presidents of the United States, only the founding President, George Washington was not a trained Lawyer.

The men who built and are still building America at every material time in its chequered political history have a thing or two in common – they were lawyers whose profession afforded them the time and opportunity to remain free to pursue greatness, personal glory and the common good of the American people.  The ones considered the greatest amongst the 44 have also been lawyers. A few will suffice - Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton.

Thomas Jefferson penned the great document of freedom, the Declaration of Independence and it was signed by the Continental Congress (representatives of the original thirteen Colonies) in 1776. Today that document enures as the fountainhead of all peoples of the world who seek freedom, self determination and good governance. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seek more likely to effect their Safety and Happiness” wrote Thomas Jefferson and over two Centuries since, this remains unimpeachable.

Abraham Lincoln led America at the most vulnerable and critical juncture in American history. The bonds of the Union were slackening because of a disagreement over the abolition or otherwise of America’s greatest sin, the evil of Slavery. It pitted brothers from the North against their kin in the South and America was to go to war. But that great Lawyer, Abraham Lincoln the Statesman will not be deterred from pursuing peace until war became inevitable. He penned this great persuasion to reason and the need to avoid war between the Union and the Confederates in his first inaugural speech – “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”. 

Still greater yet and considered by many the greatest speech ever made by mortal man was his address at Gettysburg - the Gettysburg address - at the closing stages of the American civil war. I will replicate this speech here not only for its sheer beauty but for the eternal truth it holds for all nations. 

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”. 

In 1858, two years before he was elected President, he forewarned presciently, “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South”. The momentous issues of the time eventually led to the American civil war between the Confederates and the Federal forces led by Abraham Lincoln to preserve the Union. The illustrious Lawyer and Federalist, Chief Obafemi Awolowo of Nigeria described the American civil war as a war which was aimed at the abolition of slavery, the liberation of millions of negroes who were then still being used as chattels and worse than domestic animals in a speech to the Western leaders of thought in Ibadan on May 1^st 1967 urging larger freedom, true federalism and more democracy for the federating units of Nigeria at the time and warning that the imminent civil war between a Northern driven military hierarchy and the Ibo Biafran state christened the land of the rising sun portends no one no good.

It is to the eternal credit of that great Lawyer and Statesman, Abraham Lincoln that the war ended in a manner that saw the nation reunited and more edifying was that the war signaled the end game for slavery and watered the seeds of its eventual demise as epitomized by the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation pushed through by Lincoln at the end of the war.

The great work Lawyers have done in leading their people and the monumental sacrifices they have made in the process is not lost on us on the African continent either. Africa has also produced titular legal figures who led their people well, confronted tyranny, fought dictatorships, defied apartheid and other varied and virulent forms of wicked Governments that only the African mind can contemplate/conceive. 

The evil regime of apartheid – about the worst mode of Government and segregation ever devised by man – was confronted by ordinary South African’s led by their great Lawyer leaders at unimaginable personal cost. Leaders like the Great Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Bram Fischer and many others either gave their life or their freedom for the cause and they did it with such grace, strategy and poise that only a deep knowledge of the law could have afforded them.

Nelson Mandela’s autobiography tells it all. I have read the book “Long Walk to Freedom” severally and each time I do so I gained a new insight into true leadership. How can a man be so sold and devoted to a cause? He had a thousand opportunities to betray the cause but he did not, Mandela did not even need to fight apartheid, he was a privileged black South African upon becoming a Lawyer, Mandela and Oliver Tambo had the first black law firm in the whole of South Africa and they were quite rich, they would only have gotten richer but he left all that to stand shoulder to shoulder with his black people and in time with all the oppressed people’s of South Africa.

He was even prepared to fight alongside them in the trenches and in the bushes if push came to shove. He said “I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them.” 

His conviction was unparalleled and I doubt you will find that in any African leader today. Every African alive at this time in history ought to read his speech from the dock at the Rivonia trials in 1964 where he fittingly concluded “during my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Mandela was resolute and his fortitude was such that he fought for freedom, liberation and the fulfillment of African’s in their own country at the great personal cost of family alienation, banning, imprisonment, banishment, threat of assassination and the ever present danger of execution by the South African State. He was a ‘fugitive’, a ‘criminal’, a ‘saboteur’, a ‘terrorist’ and many more unspeakable things in the eyes of the apartheid regime and its rapine Western allies. But Mandela was not any of these things by choice, he was made by the laws of apartheid, a criminal, for the sake of his people but he indubitably saw the eventual collapse of apartheid clearly even though it was difficult for others to fathom as early as 1964 when he declared at the Rivonia trials, “I have done my duty to my people and to South Africa. I have no doubt that posterity will pronounce that I was innocent and that the criminals that should have been brought before this court are the members of the government”.

Still closer home, what are Nigerian lawyers doing in the face of the great opportunities that we have as a body and as individuals to affect the course and the path our nation takes either to greatness or to perdition? How do we continue to live a life of indifference in the face of monumental tragedy unraveling before our very eyes? Every aspect of our national life is in shambles and there does not seem to be any solution in sight; at least not anytime soon. Many lawyers hold high political office today and many who do not have great influence with some of the leaders in our nation both at the State and Federal level. How have we made our influence count? What kind of Lawyer’s have we being in the face of so much want and deprivation. Where is our Abe Lincoln, where is our FDR, where is our Madiba?

Nigeria did indeed produce them in the past. We had Chief Obafemi Awolowo, we had Chief Bola Ige and many more. But how about now? Do we still have them? What kind and manner of lawyers are we today? On whom shall we call upon? Who will go for us? We are the one segment of Society who can and ought to tell truth to power and damn the consequences. What is it we gleefully quote? “Let justice be done, though the Heavens fall”. For the Nigerian lawyer it should be modified, “Let truth be told to power, though the Heavens fall”. It hurts though that even a cursory look suggests we have abandoned the teachings of old. We have forgotten our place in history. We have not stood by the people. We have connived. We have stood and still stand with those who stand against the people. We have not asked questions of those who oppress them. We have not demanded accountability from our leaders. We have acquiesced. We have not used this profession of free men to free our people from poverty and the shackles of oppression and injustice. We have not used it to confront tyranny masquerading as democracy.

New evils are upon us and we still have done nothing. We have not used this profession of free men to fight terror. The family structure is disintegrating, there is no middle class any more, many of our Children have become internet fraudsters and we do not seem alarmed. Legislative, Executive and Judicial corruption is now a past time. Oil theft in unheard of proportion is reported every day, ritual killers and forests are everywhere, baby factories are booming, strangers walk into our homes and Schools and cart away our Children, kidnapping is cake walk. In short impunity is now the new fad. Nothing is sacred anymore. There is no dignity left. Human life has become a thousand a dime. The line between good and evil has blurred. Nothing is good anymore and nothing is bad anymore. The moral relativism Pope John Paul II warned against has become the norm here.

Nonetheless ours still is indeed a profession of free men and we must use that freedom to lead and save our society, our nation and our world. No one is suggesting it is easy to do so but we had worthy examples to show that it is possible. The life and times of men like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and our own Chief Obafemi Awolowo inspire still and they have shown us the way to go. That way we should go because indifference is not an option as things stand now and if we learnt anything from history. A life of indifference is a very dangerous one. If you doubt this just ask Rwandan’s before 1994. Oh what manner of tragedy later ensued!!! Close to a million people, mostly tutsi’s and moderate hutu’s lay dead after 100 days of unimaginable savagery and madness never before imagined or seen on such a scale.

Elie Wiesel, the Jewish American holocaust survivor in “The Perils of Indifference”, one of the most empathetic and brilliant piece of writing I have ever read said this about indifference and the tragedy it can evoke “What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals? 

Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbors are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.” 

Elie Wiesel continued, “In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own. 

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.” 

This sin of indifference that Elie Wiesel so deconstructed for us has crept into our national life today and we of the profession of free men, we as lawyers, leaders in society owe it to ourselves, our Children, generations unborn, our nation and humanity to fight it, change our attitude of insouciance towards it because if we do not do so now one day they will come for us and there will be no one there for us for in the words of Martin Niemoller:

 “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

 

Stephen O. Obajaja Esq. is a Partner at the Lagos Law Firm of Fountain Court Partners.

STEPHEN O. OBAJAJA

Fountain Court Partners

Block 36B, LSPDC Estate

Ogudu Road

Ojota – Lagos.

08098066172.