OLU: THE FIRST NAME LEADER CROSSING INTER-GENERATIONAL LINES
If things proceed as planned, the NBA 2020 elections for various national offices will take place in less than 24 hours – precisely from the 29th to 30th of July 2020. Of the various candidates cleared by the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA) to run for the office of the President of the NBA is a Senior Partner at Templars and immediate past Chairman of the NBA Section on Business Law, Mr. Olumide Akpata, who seeks to become the 30th President of the NBA.
Now may we delve into the crux of this piece, since Olumide Akpata’s days as the Chairman of the Section of Business Law of the NBA, I have noticed a penchant for lawyers to call him by his first name, so you often hear “Olu” and in the next sentence you hear “Olumide” or “Akpata”. This practice was a shock to me because of the conservative nature of the legal profession. I was forced to ask a friend who did this in my presence who this Olu or Olumide he was always referring to was and he told me that he was referring to Mr. Olumide Akpata. I was gobsmacked and I then made a remark that you must be very close to him to be referring to him by his first name and he told me that he had never met the said Olumide Akpata. It was then it dawned on me, that there must be something remarkable about this man that in a very conservative profession like the legal profession which takes issues of age and seniority at the Bar very seriously (to the extent that junior colleagues are usually heard referring to senior colleagues by the term “Senior”) that there was still someone who had not subjected himself to such protocol and is known by all and sundry in the legal profession as Olu.
Fate was kind to me when I met Olu for the first time towards the twilight of his tenure as SBL Chairman when he came to the University of Benin to inaugurate the SBL club in 2018. The way and manner he interacted with the students, I had to remind myself that this person who was mixing so freely with undergraduate students of his alma mater is a very senior member of the Bar and a senior partner at one of Nigeria’s leading law firms. This ability to mix with the young and old without losing himself is the hallmark of Olu’s personality. Little wonder that young lawyers like Desmond Orisewezie and older heads like Mama Hairat Balogun and Alhaji Femi Okunnu, SAN have endorsed his candidacy to lead the Bar at this time.
Olu is known for his conviction of courage and he always says it as he sees it no matter whose ox is gored; this is not to say he does not care about other people’s emotions, as everyone can attest that Olu is blessed with a high degree of emotional intelligence. I have never seen a leader like Olu who knows how to read the room and always knows how to say the right thing to the right audience. Olu has never discriminated on the basis of age of call; he thrusts responsibility on you no matter your age, all he sees is the capacity to carry out those tasks.
The NBA is at a crossroads in its existence where the majority of members simply remain members out of compulsion, it is time for the NBA to be guided by a man who has recent relevant experience to lead the Bar. The manifesto released by Olu where he chronicles his plans for the Bar if given the privilege to serve is akin to a white paper, never in the history of the NBA has any candidate so succinctly stated his dreams and aspirations in simple and concise language laced with key performance indicators through which he can be assessed. As we inch towards the D-Day, it is a document I urge all and sundry including his opposition to read as it encapsulates the vision for a 21st-century bar without being iconoclastic. This shows the kind of leader he is going to be as everyone who has followed his career can say without fear of any equivocation that Olu is no snake oil salesman. If the English saying “the morning tells the day” is anything to go by, I will say that the NBA is ready for a jolly ride in the next 24 months if Olu is elected president.
Let me conclude this piece by saying that Olu belongs to all of us and as his mantra says he is interested in making the Bar work for all, not some. So are you a litigator, commercial lawyer, corporate lawyer, young lawyer, lawyer living with a disability, law officer, military lawyer, in-house counsel or whatever category you belong to, Olu is ready to fine-tune the Bar to fit our peculiarities. In supporting Olu’s bid to make the Bar work for all, may I draw from the words of Jim Clyburn, the whip of the United States congress when he endorsed Joe Biden’s bid to become President of the United States of America in saying “I know Olu, you know Olu but most importantly, Olu knows us.”
Ovonlen Ebhohimhen is a member of the NBA BENIN (Lion Bar)
