By Prof. Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
The history of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) parallels the country’s political evolution. It began in 1900, the same year in which Queen Victoria’s British colonial government assumed formal authority over Nigeria 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. Twelve 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 he died in 1937. He holds the record as the longest-serving national leader of the NBA.
Prof. Chidi Anselm Odinkalu 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 association’s president 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 association’s mission. 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 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 their obligations to younger lawyers more seriously, in the knowledge that if they do not, their ambitions could be 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 shorthand of Nigerian politics, this is known as “zoning”. At its best, it is an acknowledgement of the country’s ethnic diversity. 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 ambitions ultimately have to be acceptable to a broad majority of the association’s membership 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 influenced 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. The outcome may end up in 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 chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
