Integrity And The Credibility Of The Legal Profession In Nigeria Is Under Threat, Osinbajo Warns

REMARKS BY THE VICE PRESIDENT, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, AT THE BODY OF SENIOR ADVOCATES OF NIGERIA MAIDEN DINNER AT INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL, VICTORIA ISLAND, LAGOS, ON NOVEMBER 11, 2017
PROTOCOL
Let me say how very honoured I am, to have been invited to speak at this occasion, of course, I would have been here as a member but I think permitting me to speak is a special honour, and I really must say that I am privileged to be here to make these few remarks.
I must say that I am here in three capacities; one as a member of the body of senior advocates, the other of course, as a guest in my capacity as Vice President, but, I am also here as an indigene of Ikenne, the Nigerian village that has the highest number of Senior Advocates of Nigeria per capita, or if you like, per square metre.
When I listened to my brother, Silk Paul Usoro, speaking somewhat proudly of the nine SANs in Akwa Ibom State, I could not resist whispering to my Lord Justice Okoro, that my brother Akin Osinbajo, is the 12th of the SANs of Ikenne, and there are 13 so far, and that I am humbly the 7th SAN.
I became a SAN in 2002. So I would really like to encourage all of my brothers especially Paul Usoro SAN, and other SANs like himself, we could lend you a few if you like just to add to the numbers.
My Lords Senior Advocates of Nigeria, the elite in every community whether it be an ethnic, religious or professional elite, owe a responsibility to that community. It is their duty to define the common purposes, the ethics, the vogues, what is acceptable and what cannot be tolerated in that community.
Above all, they owe a responsibility to preserve the community. The future, as it were, depends on their vision or lack of it. For the professional elite such as ourselves, we owe a responsibility to ensure that the profession that referred us to the rank that we occupy, that is the highest in our profession, continues to thrive and flourish.
First for the selfish reason that it confers greater respect and prestige on the rank we enjoy, second that we being leaders in the profession can even become more successful, but more importantly, for the altruistic and ultimately more enduring reason, that we leave a profession that continues to provide livelihood and prestige for generations after us.
Ultimately, the difference between the elite who build great and enduring societies or professions, and those who destroy the patrimony, is the extent to which the elite is willing to make sacrifices and constrain that innate selfishness that all human beings have.
Put differently, the seriousness with which an elite recognizes and honours the responsibility of privilege or perhaps what the French describe as ‘noblesse oblige’: the responsibility of nobility or the privilege, the responsibility of the elite to act with honour, to act with integrity, to act sometimes with kindness, and sometimes with generosity.
So it was then the British elite, for example, the Barons, who realized that their wealth and influence would always be in jeopardy if might and power remained equivalent to right. They recognized that to control the abuse of power by the king, or by any one of them, they all had to agree to be subject to certain objective rules that recognized rights by virtue of one’s humanity as distinct from means or power.
So they agreed to sacrifice individual ambitions, they agreed to sacrifice individual wealth or power, for the greater good by the observance of the rule of law. And so in 1215 AD sword in hand, they forced King John to sign the immortally egalitarian words of the Magna Carta Libertatum.
The great charter of freedoms from which almost every other charter of freedom in human history has borrowed; let me remind us of one of its famous provisions: it says, “to none will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice”.
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Oluyemi Oluleke “Yemi” Osinbajo is a Nigerian Lawyer and politician who is the current Vice President of Nigeria, in office since 29 May 2015.
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