A Call For Urgent Shrewdness by Young Lawyers and Monitoring by ECNBA

It’s no longer news that the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) has announced her annual conference schedule to hold come August and this year is special to the NBA as a new national EXCOS would be elected.

Drawing from the foregoing, the NBA has appointed electoral committee(ECNBA) for the forthcoming election and the committee had begun actions by scheduling plan for the election and particularly announced the election would be e-voting and other preparations for a free and credible election underway.

Encouragingly as usual, many a senior lawyers amid the COVID’19 Palliatives graciously given by them have gone extra mile to encourage young lawyers (1-7 years post call) by paying their conference fees. This has become an annual excitement among young lawyers who by this singular gesture participate in the rich programs of the NBA National Conference.

The peculiar nature of 2020 in human history however has touch on this annual gesture of payment of conference fee of young lawyers by well spirited senior lawyers, as strange and worrisome information are required by some contestants and/or their agents as basis for accessing the grant viz;

Name
Phone number
Supreme Court (Enrollment) Number
Email Address etc
These information are collected from organized groups like NYSC Legal Aid CDS group(Port Harcourt, Rivers State) and support groups of various contestants etc at various NBA branch.

The worry is why do certain contestants/or their agents insist on:

a.) SCN number and email address of young lawyers?

b.) What has email address got to do with identification of a young lawyer in accessing personal grants?

c.) Why have other benefactors doing same good if not more never require such information from their beneficiaries?

d.) Could the collection of the SCN and email address be used for illegal voting in forthcoming NBA National election, considering the poor I.C.T in Nigeria and uncommon dexterity of hackers? This is because same requirements with password(that could be reset using the email address etc) is individual lawyers’ access point to NBA website- the probable platform for the e-voting.

e.) If (d) above is true, whether young unsuspecting lawyers would still have right to vote their choice or their votes would be unknowingly done without their consent. Worst still, they would be coerced and monitored to vote for the candidate who paid their conference fee.

d.) Whether there are other means of ascertaining/identifying young lawyers without their SCN number and email before giving grants? Surely, there are many ways even within these “groups” of young lawyers.

Consequently, the call for:
ECNBA to closely monitor activities of would be suspects and develop an air-tight e-voting system to check activities of hackers in view of this development and other gimmicks yet to be developed!
Young lawyers should desist from being used as willing tool of election malpractice and be circumspect with divulging personal data.
Contestants should sell out practicable ideas of leadership that would win support than indulging in conducts unbecoming of reputable legal practitioners of their standing.
Grants should be made available to young lawyers as contribution to raising noble men of the today/tomorrow’s Bar and not “legalized” vote buying.

David Oheobe, Ede, Esq, AICMC.