I am finally able to read the extraordinarily honest interview given by our very own Prof. Ernest Ojukwu SAN to the Thisday newspaper of today 21st April 2015.
I am not in the business of praise singing Nigerian-style at all, but in 2007, in SF, USA, I read a dossier of a Nigerian senior lawyer who was, as it was described, ‘struggling to inject a dose of sanity’ into the Nigerian legal education and ethics …’ The spread was about Prof. Ernest Ojukwu of the Nigerian Law School.
The interview today was not a typical Nigerian public official, painting a false picture for an unwary public. It was an unusual candid opinion of a consummate legal luminary concerned about the disintegrating state of legal education in Nigeria. The interview and his diagnosis and his scalpel are wide-ranging! Indeed, it encapsulates the efforts and exertions of one man, who undoubtedly loves his country, his profession and petrified of its future!
I cannot help but be seduced by the Professor’s anguish and revulsion about the goings on and the debauched state of our Nigerian Bar Association (NBA)- the management, attitudes, the elections, the structure etc. The cross of our revered legal profession cannot be borne by one lonely man – the burden of years of neglect, mediocrity, mendacity and recklessness.
It would have been nice for Nigeria, for a change, to listen to such mellifluous voices as Prof. Ojukwu’s!. I was also trained in the best traditions of the American legal system. That system routinely produces world class advocates, consummate attorneys and public intellectuals. They are the types who march through lonely roads, listening to unknown mellifluous melodies from the Mozarts of the legal incandescence, for years, before their mates are aware of them.
I read and remember the exploits of names like, Clarence Darrow of Chicago, F. Lee
Bailey of Boston, Johnny Cochran of LA, Charles Gary of Oakland CA, et al.
Prof. Ernest Ojukwu is of that ilk. And I personally appreciate his monumental efforts, immensely- efforts offered to the service of an ungrateful country.
Castro Mpenekun Ginigeme is a practising lawyer based in Abuja, FCT, Nigeria. Called to the Bar in 1984.
