Governor Wike is Right: Lawyers are the Problem of this Country

C.A.J. CHINWO WROTE

While commissioning the new law office building of Leedum A. Mitee & Co (Inata Chambers) on Friday January 30, 2021, Governor Nyesom Wike, one of the very lucky lawyers in Nigeria to climb to the heights of the legal profession by not struggling through the ladder and rigours of legal practice, working day and night to fulfill the ‘righteousness which is according to the law’, made a very profound statement which, though not original, is true. I agree with him on many issues and this happens to be one of them. Since I joined the legal profession in 1987, even though no one, until the Governor, has ever dared to tell me that I do not know the law (and I confess I know just little), I have been in battles against the profession I love because of this truth. It seems to be the reason why Jesus Christ also said ‘Woe unto lawyers.

In 2004 at the Annual Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association, Nana Addo, today 2ndterm President of Ghana, then President of Ghana Bar Association, after praising Nigerian lawyers for their flamboyance and presence made a statement I will never forget and which I have quoted often in this and other forums: ‘The day Nigerian lawyers change, Nigeria will change’. At the time a lawyer, the gentle giant, John Kuffour was the President of Ghana. Addo told conferees at the International Conference Centre Abuja, how Ghanaian lawyers purged themselves of arrogance, indifference to the suffering of the people, collaboration with government and the select rich to oppress the poor masses and began to say the truth to power. Ghana changed. Today our children are shipped to Ghana for even secondary education. Our investors, including politicians who stole our money, are fleeing to Ghana to invest and Ghanaians are chasing Nigerians like rodents! It is all because Ghanaian lawyers changed.

Inata Chambers, thankfully, is a law office in Rivers State where the founder can say that, like Moses, he decided to identify with the suffering of his people than to enjoy the pleasures of Egypt. Everyone who ever met Leedum Mitee in Court agreed that, in any system where merit and truth guarantee honour and promotion, he should have been a Senior Advocate of Nigeria as soon as he qualified. The Governor was absolutely right on this too. He was the lawyer to my community, Rumuewhara, between 1985 and 1989. But until now he is not a Senior Advocate in Nigeria.

Without denying the undoubted merit of most who have got it, honour in the legal profession in Nigeria, whether on the Bench or at the Bar, in some cases is being thrown to dogs – those who go from place to place seeking briefs to put their names, those who forge court documents, who go to politicians to grovel in order to be elevated, who include in their fees money for bribing of Judges (even though in most cases they never give the Judges).

Mitee could have chosen to be a lawyer for all the oil companies in Nigeria and fight against any Ogoni or Niger Delta person that wanted to protest against the oil majors or dared sue them. They would have paid him to raise all sorts of preliminary objections: from objecting that there is any place known as Ogoni, to the jurisdiction of the Courts in which an action is filed, to the forms of action which are dead but rule us from the grave. The ‘owners of the profession’ in Lagos and Ibadan who do the oil company briefs would easily have drawn him into the Inner Bar and changed his gown. He would have built his big office long before now.

But Mitee renounced all those attractions to follow the stormy petrel, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and fight for the survival of Ogoni people in Nigeria. I am told he was almost condemned to die but for the intervention of a former Federal Attorney-General with whom he had had trial battles in Court and who was constrained to ask Mitee, like Saul asked David after killing Goliath, ‘young man whose son are you?’ He survived and still stuck with being committed to the truth. He became a leading light in the Civil Society Coalition – those the government ‘patriots’ describe as dissidents, unpatriotic, ignorant, rabble rousers and who are accused of all those things for which no one can be invited to eat with the king in his palace, not to talk of entering the kingdom. He is lucky that Governors can now attend his event.

Even though Mitee is not so much in the trenches today, I have no cause to think that he is no longer with the ‘talakawas’ or that he is ashamed to be associated with those lawyers who are ignorant and foolish for daring to ask the government to do the right things and do things right. It was at the commissioning of Mitee’s new office that Governor Wike stated that lawyers are truly part of the problems of Nigeria, especially Rivers State. Mitee promised that he would devote the office to mentoring younger lawyers. I pray he would mentor lawyers to be like him, to learn that the law is to be used to serve the interest of justice, truth, mercy and righteousness and be a school master to those who do everything against sound doctrine. May Mitee mentor his protégés to know that a lawyer has wasted his life and disappointed his God and the society if he sees the legal profession as a ticket to chop and enjoy when people are dying; that a lawyer who sides with injustice and abuse of the law and the Constitution is not worth the paper on which his certificate was written. He should mentor them to know that without courage a lawyer is a robot.

I believe that Mitee would mentor his protégés (I am one too, albeit from a distance) that be they in their communities, churches, companies, government, civil service or wherever, they must be concerned with the weightier matters of the law and not side with oppression so that they would be accepted.

He should teach them to not be like the Pharisees who say ‘do as I say but not as I do’ but be those who use the law lawfully and bring honour to it; he should teach them that wherever they are they should be examples of what lawyers ought to be, like Paul told his mentee, Timothy: Let no one despise your youth, but be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, in purity. Till I come, give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you by prophecy with the laying on of the hands of the eldership. Meditate on these things; give yourself entirely to them, that your progress may be evident to all. Take heed to yourself and to the doctrine. Continue in them, for in doing this you will save both yourself and those who hear you. (Holy Bible, 1Timothy 4: 11-16).

The legal profession in Nigeria, which has as its slogan, ‘the protection of the rule of law’, is becoming the bastion of lawlessness and illegality. I became a Christian in my final year in 1986. I feared I could not be a Christian and be a lawyer. Many said so. But when I got to the Law School and began to study Professional Ethics, I realised that only true Christians could be true lawyers. As a result even though my first love was academics, I did not go to the classroom until 17 years after. But the things I saw in practice stunned me. It made me a ‘protestant lawyer’.

1991, I wrote a 6 page petition to Justice Donald Graham-Douglas, Chief Judge of Rivers State decrying what I was seeing in the Magistrate Courts and the Registry. I posted it like Martin Luther’s Thesis against the Roman Church in Germany. I was mocked and I was threatened. Some gave me thumbs up but never wanted to be quoted or seen with me. They feared I would be run out of the profession. Thanks to God I am still around. But I did not realise then that ‘this generation of lawyers was responsible for this generation of registrars and the bench’ or that ‘this generation of lawyers is responsible for lawlessness in the society’.

Truly, lawyers are the problems of Nigeria. As Vice Presidents, Governors, Local Government Chairmen, they have shown so much disdain for the rule of law and constitutionalism that Nigeria is always on the rise in global ranking for corruption, lawlessness and disorder, abuse of human rights, destruction of the rule of law, increase in arbitrariness and total mockery of democracy contrary to the famous definition of the term by another lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. You would have thought that such would not happen where lawyers are in charge. In Nigeria the reverse is the case.

Lawyers as law teachers failed to teach their students – future lawyers – that they are expected to be paragons of obedience to the law not foremost despisers of the law. They did not teach their students some of whom became Governors, legislators at all levels and local government chairmen, the difference between democracy and dictatorship. They did not teach them that true democratic and constitutional governance is one that encourages the existence of a robust legislature and submits itself to the rule of law. Law teachers failed to explain to their students the meaning and importance of due process and the difference between private wealth and public wealth.

They did not teach their students that a lawyer must be the best advertisement of order, decorum, wisdom and lawfulness in thoughts, words and actions and never bring the law to reproach.
I agree with his Excellency that lawyers are the major sources of problems in Nigeria.

They promise politicians that anything is possible as long as the right amount of money is available and that every person and everything has a price. As Dean Swift said, Nigerian lawyers have truly shown that they can call white black and black white according to the amount paid.

Lawyers as Judges in Nigeria have sold injustice (coated as judgments of court) to the highest bidders or most powerful. In some jurisdictions Judges now set up their own issues not raised by parties to determine cases involving government and ensure poor individuals and communities continue to suffer if they want to appeal or ‘appeal to God’. There is God o!

Senior lawyers who should advise Governors and others find joy in receiving gifts of all sorts from them and turn the other way while evil walks with swagger in Nigeria. Attorneys-General advise Governors to disobey the law and malign lawyers who say no. They are Nigeria’s problems at the Federal and State levels. Who shall deliver Nigeria from its lawyers?