By Abdul Mahmud
Last week, I read a few Facebook posts about the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Annual General Conference which took place in Port Harcourt.
The Uyo-based lawyer and scholar, Solomon Ekokoi’s post on the shoddy arrangements captured the mood better than most. There was, clearly, much to complain about in the organisation of this year’s conference.
But the concern of this column lies elsewhere and is, for all practical purposes, a more fundamental one: between the 2025 Enugu AGC, where Julius Malema was the keynote speaker, and the 2026 Port Harcourt AGC, where George Weah delivered the keynote address, one cannot help but ask what these choices say about the direction of the Nigerian Bar Association.
Perhaps someone needs to explain what happened to the intellectual imagination of the Nigerian Bar Association.
The NBA is not another jack-in-the-box professional association gathering people together for an annual jamboree.
The legal profession occupies a peculiar place in any serious country because lawyers are expected to engage with the questions that govern the exercise of power, the meaning of liberty, the character of the State and the obligations of citizens. A Bar conference should therefore be one of those rare occasions when the profession moves away from routine litigations and confronts the larger questions that confront a country and its citizens.
Who is invited to address such a gathering is therefore not a trivial matter. A keynote speaker is not simply an entertainer who happens to possess a recognisable name. The choice is itself a statement about what the association considers intellectually important.
And this is where I find the recent choices deeply troubling.
Julius Malema is a formidable political personality. He is a controversial figure, an accomplished political mobiliser and an arresting public speaker, but he lacks the intellectual nous, analytical depth and conceptual rigour that would ordinarily qualify a political personality to deliver a keynote address to a profession whose central preoccupation is the disciplined interrogation of law, power and society.
George Weah is a global sporting icon who became President of Liberia. His journey from football to the presidency is remarkable and worthy of discussion. But neither achievement, celebrity nor political visibility automatically translates into intellectual authority appropriate for a keynote address to a professional body whose membership includes some of Africa’s finest legal minds. The question is not whether Weah is an accomplished man. Of course, he is.
The question, therefore, is not simply whether a keynote speaker is famous or accomplished in some other field, but whether the record he brings to the podium is compatible with the intellectual and ethical demands of the occasion. In the case of George Weah, his stature as an international football icon and former president of Liberia could not, by itself, erase the troubling human-rights record of his presidency, including the failure to advance accountability for grave violations committed during Liberia’s civil wars and his government’s retreat from the question of a war-crimes court. To invite such a figure to deliver a keynote to a profession whose foundational claim is a commitment to the rule of law and human rights was, at the very least, a profoundly questionable exercise of judgment.
Celebrity cannot be permitted to launder a record that ought itself to invite scrutiny.
When the Nigerian Bar Association convenes its annual conference, the intellectual standard ought to be considerably higher. The question should not be how famous a prospective keynote speaker is, how many followers he commands or how much publicity his presence might generate, but what new question he will compel the profession to confront, what body of thought he will bring to the table and what difficult conversation his address will provoke.
These are not unreasonable demands; they are the minimum questions any intellectually serious professional association ought to ask of the person entrusted with its keynote. The NBA seems increasingly comfortable with personalities when what it ought to be searching for are ideas. It celebrates visibility more readily than scholarship, confuses popularity with influence and public recognition with intellectual depth. Did the immediate past President not himself suggest that Martins Otse was invited to a roundtable at the conference partly because he had more followers on social media than the NBA? At some point, the NBA’s appetite for celebrity begins to look less like an attempt to engage the public and more like an abdication of intellectual judgment.
The absurdity is that, in a profession whose very business is the disciplined engagement of ideas, the harder work of thought appears increasingly to be giving way to the easier currency of visibility.
This should worry every lawyer, particularly when set against the depth of the African intellectual tradition available to us. Issa Shivji, a towering African legal thinker, has spent decades interrogating law, constitutionalism, class and political economy in Africa; Makau Mutua has profoundly shaped contemporary debates on human rights and international law; while Nigeria itself has produced contemporary legal scholars of the stature of Wahab Egbewole and Oyelowo Oyewo.
Their scholarship does more than furnish answers to familiar legal questions; it unsettles assumptions that have too easily become settled and demands a more searching engagement with the problems confronting nation-states.
Africa or the disaporan black race has never suffered from an absence of ideas. Our problem has often been the unwillingness of institutions to take ideas seriously.
The irony is particularly painful in the legal profession. Lawyers make their living from words and ideas. They argue over constitutional meaning, interrogate precedent, distinguish one principle from another, challenge assumptions, and persuade judges to see familiar facts differently. The intellectual life of the lawyer should therefore be inseparable from the practice of law. A profession that ceases to think deeply eventually ceases to practise law deeply. This is not an argument for elitism, nor is it an argument that only university professors can deliver meaningful keynote addresses. A lawyer, politician, entrepreneur, artist or athlete may possess extraordinary insights. But relevance must be demonstrated, not assumed. A conference of lawyers should not lower its intellectual threshold simply because a prospective speaker possesses an identifiable celebrity status.
Nigeria desperately needs institutions capable of producing serious public thoughts. Our political class has not provided enough of it. Our universities struggle under enormous constraints. The media is increasingly dominated by immediacy. The Bar, with its intellectual resources and constitutional role, ought to be filling some of this vacuum. When the Bar lowers its intellectual expectations, our country loses one more place where difficult questions might have been asked without fear. The organisers of NBA conferences should in future rethink what a keynote address is supposed to accomplish.
The objective should not be to generate photographs, headlines or fleeting social-media excitement. A keynote should provoke thought worthy of the institution hosting it, challenge the profession to interrogate its assumptions, confront the defining questions of its time and leave its audience with ideas that endure beyond the conference hall. There is no suggestion here that every keynote speaker must be an Issa Shivji. That would be absurd.
What is required is something much simpler: intellectual seriousness.
The new President of the NBA should therefore look beyond the predictable culture of performative visibility, in which celebrity, social-media following and public recognition have become increasingly attractive substitutes for intellectual consequence.
The Association should resist the temptation to measure relevance by the size of a person’s audience and instead recover a more demanding conception of intellectual authority that’s grounded in ideas, scholarship, originality and the capacity to unsettle received wisdom. The NBA needs fewer celebrities at its podiums and more minds capable of making the profession think. Why not invite Issa Shivji to speak to Nigerian lawyers about law, power, political economy and the enduring struggle over the meaning of justice? Why not bring Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, to Nigeria to speak about climate change, climate justice and the grotesque inequalities embedded in the global response to the climate emergency? Mottley is not another head of government who happens to speak eloquently about climate change; through the Bridgetown Initiative, she has placed the relationship between climate change, global finance, debt and development at the centre of the international conversation. And if the NBA chooses to extend that conversation to Africa and the oceans that connect us, it can invite Wavel Ramkalawan, the former President of Seychelles, whose country embodies the existential threats posed by rising seas to small island states.
Seychelles has itself described climate change as an existential threat, while Ramkalawan has argued that the ocean must be treated as a central pillar of the climate agenda rather than an afterthought.
These are the sorts of people a keynote committee should be thinking about. Not because they are celebrities whose presence would fill a conference hall, but precisely because they would force Nigerian lawyers to think beyond the narrow confines of legal practice. What does our law owe communities in Igbokoda and Okitipupa in Ondo State that are facing ecological collapse, with some disappearing into the sea? What does environmental justice mean in a country where oil extraction, pollution, land degradation and the destruction of livelihoods are everyday realities?
What obligations do lawyers, courts, governments and corporations have to generations that have not yet been born? These are legal, political and moral questions, and a profession that prides itself on being the guardian of justice should be willing to engage them seriously.
In the Age of Climate Change and Environmental Injustice, the NBA cannot afford to be playing pussy-fussy with its intellectual life. The annual conference should not become another stage for photographs with famous people whose principal qualification is that they are famous. The keynote should be an intellectual intervention, an invitation to think more deeply about the world in which the law operates and the kind of society the profession is helping to construct. If the new President wants to leave a mark, one place to begin is by restoring intellectual seriousness to the NBA conference keynote.
Over to you, Mr President, Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN!