Corporate Reforms.
The NBA must galvanize the public and private sectors towards greater joint participation in corporate governance through PPP initiatives aimed at growing the Nigerian economy and creating jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities for our army of unemployed youth as well as small and medium scale enterprises. In the same vein, the bar must offer itself, more than ever before, as a platform to champion the cause of creating a progressive investment climate in Nigeria as a way of ensuring an influx of foreign investments into our economy.

Among other salient issues in this regard, the bar must network with both the legislative and executive arms of Government to facilitate corporate law reforms that will not only improve but seek to ensure compliance with global best practice standard in the areas of acquisition and ownership of commercial and industrial lands, including encouraging a uniform and less complicated procedure for the application and issuance of Certificates of Occupancy in different parts of the country; the cost and duration of incorporation of companies; a reformed and standardised business immigration law and procedure; and a uniform and standardised company tax regime.

The Bar, as a change agent, must also work with the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to drive Intellectual Property Law reforms that will ensure adequate legal protection for artistic creations and scientific inventions as well as transparent and predictable standard of adjudication and/or fair arbitration process and other alternative dispute resolutionmethods that are credible and consistent with global best practice standard.

A very important question which must also engage the attention of the leadership and senior members of the Nigerian bar as we all participate in the 2015 Annual General Conference of the association is how does our bar association remain relevant to the younger generations of attorneys? In particular, how do we communicate with these attorneys? How do we recognize and value what they bring to our profession? And how do we convey to them the many significant benefits that participation in our association can provide over the course of one’s legal career?

Convinced that the young lawyers are actually the mirror of our profession, I urge the leadership and secretariat of the NBA to always ensure that at our Annual General Bar Conferences, we always examine this issue as an important item on the agenda of our summit. We must continue to address it as a real challenge and consciously encourage discussions about bridging generational fault lines for the future of the legal profession.Either at this Abuja summit or at some point soon, a panel of leaders in the profession must discuss how today’s generational mix of practising attorneys can best work together in our profession’s new world order of rapidly changing technology, increased client demands, global competition and changing business models.

They will examine the different attitudes these generations have in their career approaches and expectations, and what this means for employers; the differences in their communication strategies, use of technology and expectations of privacy; whether and how ethics might evolve and fit into a new and changing culture; and their interest in professional development and mentoring.How does our Bar association remain relevant? This is a critical question for all Bar associations, and we should work together to arrive at some answers to it in Nigeria.

I wish all our colleagues a fruitful participation and happy celebration of the change philosophy and new ideas on how to move Nigeria forward. And I congratulate President MuhammaduBuhari and our Vice President, Prof.YemiOsinbajo (himself an icon of the legal profession) as they step out for the first time, as elected leaders of the Nigerian nation, to play host to the annual summit of lawyers and custodians of the instrument of social engineering, without whose buying-in the Buhari administration’s passion for enthronement of good governance through legal reforms would be a highway to nowhere.

*Michael Opeyemi Bamidele, a Solicitor & Advocate of the Supreme Court of Nigeria; an Attorney and Counsellor-at-Law of the State of New York; and a Fellow of the Chattered Institute of Arbitrators, Nigeria, wrote in from the Abuja based Law Office of Opeyemi Bamidele & Associates.