Let’s talk about STD – the distinction between sexually transmitted diseases – By Chidi Odinkalu

In a country and an age where openness is not always considered a virtue, those who make it the currency of their daily lives are either idolized, compromised, or deified to the point of endangerment. On the streets of Nigeria, a person who openly addresses issues of public concern can be said to have “broken the table.” As a figure of speech, this usage is a double-edged compliment for resisting the national habit of sugarcoating reality in a bodyguard of avoidance.

However, tables can be useless without a chair or bench. If the table is scattered, the bench that goes with it can suddenly be of limited use. To paraphrase a Nigerian, lawyers and benches are like five and six. Judges and magistrates are referred to as members of the “bench.” In some countries, when lawyers need to discuss a matter in private in court with the judge, they “approach the bench.”

Even before that, when they are admitted to practice, their admission to the profession is monitored by a Body of Benchers, which is composed of “legal practitioners of the highest distinction in the legal profession in Nigeria” as defined by the Legal Practitioners Act. The body’s self-proclaimed “vision” (sic) is to “be a beacon of legal professionalism and to set standards for legal education, qualifications and conduct worldwide.”

To achieve this, the Body of Benchers must at least themselves embody the highest standards of the profession. This could have been said of them many years ago.

These days, it seems, it is the Benchers who are at war with the Tables. In Nigeria’s Body of Benchers, the Tables are currently being scattered in a manner that exposes how the standards of the legal profession have become hostage to a capricious entitlement mentality of its leadership. Amid the daily dose of drama that defines Nigerian life, the spectacle that plays out in the Body of Benchers has been largely shielded from public attention. It is time to remedy this neglect.

There is another reason why this matter deserves attention. For several weeks, the current leadership of the Body of Benchers has been attempting to intimidate journalists, reporters and platform providers, threatening them with unspoken consequences if they even dared to publish material about the current crisis in the body. Those who had already published were sent instructions to remove the material, along with threats of vicious consequences if they did not comply. This level of effort to suppress and attack the legitimate exercise of a lawful profession is both intolerable and unlawful. It may even be criminal.

The Body of Benchers is a statutory body. Any status enjoyed by its members is conferred upon them by law. Therefore, the citizens have a duty to keep the body and its members in check.

Since the current crisis in the Body of Benchers has its origins ultimately in membership issues, it is important to look a little more closely at the issue of membership. The Body is made up of two categories of members. Life Benchers enjoy lifelong membership. They may attain this status either ex officio or by dutiful long-term membership after at least five years. There are also Ordinary Members of the Body, whose membership is not for life. Members include both lawyers and judges. In the interests of equity, leadership rotates annually between judges and lawyers, so that if a judge chairs the Body one year, a lawyer will chair the following year.

Membership of the Body of Benchers used to adhere very closely to the statutory requirement of restricting it to persons of “highest distinction”. Today, some aspects of the body have degenerated into influence. For example, they have granted automatic membership to senior federal lawmakers who are lawyers, such as the Chairmen of both Houses of the National Assembly, as well as some key committee chairmen. In fact, a former governor and serving minister with a reputation for “generosity” is one of the most famous Life Benchers.

But we digress. Among the committees set up within the body, an Appointments Committee screens candidates for membership, presumably to ensure that they meet the minimum requirements of the law. This committee is headed by a Chairman whose term of office is three years. In the last week of March 2024, Augustine Alegeh, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and one of the most eminent presidents of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in the last three decades, officially accepted the nomination to head the Appointments Committee.

The following week, the body elected a new chairman, whose first act was to issue a decree dissolving the existing committees and recreating them. The problem is that, according to its own rules of procedure, the power to form committees lies not with the chairman, but with the entire body of Benchers. For the avoidance of doubt, the body is constituted for this purpose by a quorum of at least 50 of its members. Many members of the body rightly saw this claim to sole power by the current chairman as a descent into a domination-free autocracy. The new chairman’s decision to ignore their protests only heightened this fear.

The case is now before the courts, as Mr Alegeh has filed suit against the chairman and the general assembly as defendants. The actual issue before the courts is of great importance. One member feared in a letter that the chairman, who invoked non-existent powers to dissolve and replace the appointments committee, was “fomenting suspicion” that he was simply trying to ensure that he got his way during his term of office.

In this case, it is alleged that the Chairman of the Body of Benchers attempted to manipulate the governance of the body in general and the composition of the Appointments Committee in particular.

This question of the extent to which performance in the Nigerian legal profession can be considered a sexually transmitted disease is ultimately the question that the Federal Court must address in the case currently pending concerning the actions of the current Chairman of the Body of Benchers. It is an important question that, in the interests of the profession, deserves the utmost attention of all persons affected by the institutions of law in Nigeria.

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