A Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Afam Osigwe, has won the presidential election of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), which was held on Saturday.
Mr Osigwe, a former General Secretary of the NBA between 2014 and 2016, polled 20,435 votes, more than half of the total ballots cast for the presidential position, to defeat his two rivals.
Tobenna Erojikwe came a distant second with 10,998 votes, and another SAN, Chukwuka Ikuazom, who announced withdrawing from the race in the middle of the election on Saturday, came third with 9,018 votes.
The voting by accredited members of the NBA took place electronically between 12 a.m. and 11.59 a.m. on Saturday.
As of the time voting closed, 40,451 votes were tallied for the office of the association’s president with 205 abstentions, according to the results portal updated every minute during the election by the Electoral Committee of the NBA (ECNBA).
Winners also emerged from the elections of nine other national officers.
Zonal representatives of the General Council of of the association from the Eastern, Northern and Western zones were also elected.
The election for the president was restricted to eligible candidates from the Eastern zone of the NBA, whose turn it is, under the association’s strict zoning arrangement, to fill the position for the next two years.
The two other regional groups are the Western zone and the Northern zone, which produced the outgoing president in 2022. A splinter zone, called the Mid-Western zone emerged from the Western region in 2014 to produce Augustine Alegeh, a SAN, as the president. But the group has since retracted to its low-key status within the Western zone.
The inauguration of the new president and other national officers is billed to take place during the NBA 2024 Annual Conference in Lagos between 23 and 28 August.
Mr Osigwe, who campaigned for office to tackle corruption in the bar and on the bench, is expected to revive the dwindling NBA’s traditional role of holding public officers accountable and take leadership on other issues of public interest.
His NBA leadership comes when public confidence in the judiciary and the legal profession, generally, has kept a down spiral fuelled by a series of perverse court decisions, crashing professional and ethical standards, and frustrating delays cases suffer in court.
Mr Osigwe, who became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 2020, will also inherit the welling discontent of various interest groups threatening to break the NBA into splinters.