NBA on Trial: Senior Advocate Drags NBA, Others to Court Over Alleged Rigging, Says Bar Elections Are a Crime Scene!
In what is being described as a landmark legal battle that could shake the very foundations of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), fiery Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Steve Ononye SAN, has filed a bombshell suit against the NBA and its newly sworn-in President, Mazi Afam Osigwe SAN, over what he calls “a history of rigged, manipulated, and fraudulent elections.”
Ononye, visibly angered by the NBA’s electoral culture, is not mincing words: “Since the adoption of universal suffrage which we all fought for and embraced as a fantastic development in our electioneering process, every single election has been tainted with rigging, backend manipulation, and data corruption; it has become a crime scene, not an election.”
In the suit, Ononye isn’t just asking for reforms he’s demanding a full surgical restructuring of the NBA’s electoral framework. His prayers before the court include a mandatory order compelling the NBA to open up its backend electronic voting system for real-time monitoring by candidates and to adopt a transparent, auditable, and fair voting process going forward.
THE RELIEFS DEMANDED:
Among other declarations, Ononye seeks:
• That the NBA must uphold its 2021 Constitution, particularly the clauses guaranteeing fairness and transparency.
• That candidates and their agents must be granted full access to all stages of the election, including the secretive and controversial electronic backend which past candidates have claimed is the nerve center of manipulation.
• That all NBA elections henceforth must be verifiable, auditable, and open to scrutiny not coded in secrecy.
A CABALIZED BAR?
Within legal circles, murmurs have now turned to shouts: “No one becomes NBA President without bowing to the cabals!” The allegations are chilling a powerful group of insiders allegedly control who gets elected, how they get elected, and who gets pushed out.
Ononye’s suit echoes the frustrations of many Nigerian lawyers who say the Bar has lost its soul to political influence, corruption, and vote-buying.
A DEFINING MOMENT FOR OSIGWE SAN
For President Afam Osigwe SAN, this isn’t just a lawsuit, it’s a moral test. Will he rise above the system and usher in the reform the NBA desperately needs, or will he stand in the way of justice?
Analysts say this moment offers him a rare opportunity to go down in history as the man who saved the NBA not as another name in the long list of those who upheld a broken system.
“The NBA is gasping for breath,” one senior lawyer remarked. “And this lawsuit is a defibrillator, it could bring the Bar back to life or expose its final collapse.”
With this case, the Nigerian Bar Association stands at a historic crossroad will it choose light or continue in the shadows?
