A purported letter credited to Miss Carol Ajie and addressed to President Muhammadu Buhari, et al, has been making the rounds on social media in the past few days. The said letter is asking their excellencies to derecognise Mr Paul Usoro SAN as the NBA president.
Mr Paul Usoro was elected as the president of the NBA in August 2018 by a majority of lawyers who voted in an election that was keenly contested.
Till date, there has neither been an impeachment or resignation by Mr Paul Usoro SAN. To this end, both dejure and defacto, Paul Usoro SAN remains the duly elected president of the NBA with the mandate of a vast majority of lawyers in Nigeria.
Carol’s infantile letter raises a number of issues some of which would be highlighted below.
First, on what authority is Carol writing the purported letter to PMB and Ors? Carol is only a member of the NBA. She is neither an officer of the Association nor a member of its board of trustees. This alone makes her intentions glaring and one can see through it that only selfishness and bad faith could have induced the writing of such letter.
Has Carol not deceived the public enough? This time, she has gone to dig up an old news in a vanguard publication of 04 November 2016, only to redate it 02 January 2019.
Second, there are laid down procedures in the NBA constitution for any aggrieved member of the Association to ventilate his/her grievance. Carol has not utilised any of these procedures. There has never been a motion to remove or impeach Mr Usoro as the NBA president.
On the contrary, at the December 2018 NEC meeting of the NBA, the president got a standing ovation from lawyers after listening to the truth about the false allegations of the EFCC. One now wonders where Carol got her basis from when she asserted that after the arraignment of Mr Paul Usoro, her colleagues called for his resignation.
As a corollary to the above, one would ask; on what basis is Carol writing busy executives like their Excellencies the purported letter? The NBA is a private Association of lawyers. It is neither a government agency nor a creation of statute. In view of this, I make bold to say that PMB and their other Excellencies to whom the letter is addressed have no business with recognising or derecognising Mr Paul Usoro as the NBA president as the case may be. No other candidate is laying claim to the revered seat and there is no conflict howsoever as to who is the president of the NBA.
Carol’s letter is mischievous. It represents a bitter fight against the NBA leadership for refusing to allow her hoodwink the leadership of the NBA into doing her whims and caprices. The purported letter only serves her personal and selfish interest and should be disregarded by every right thinking person.
In any event, Mr Paul Usoro is not deterred in his bid to fulfill his campaign promises of making the NBA more professional, transparent and true to its purpose.
I personally think that Carol’s conduct in the scheme of things is getting out of hand and is unbecoming of a legal practitioner. It is time to make her take responsibility for her actions. It is no longer enough to ignore Carol’s wicked and evil antics of continuously maligning and blackmailing the person of Mr Paul Usoro SAN and indeed the NBA leadership.
I say this because she’s done same to past NBA Presidents and gets emboldened to continue by the inaction of members.
I personally appeal to the NBA leadership to take disciplinary actions against this squaremouthed folk of a woman called Carol Ajie.
Enough is enough!
Kingsley Iheakaram