Professor Chidi Odinkalu has resigned his membership of the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association, ECNBA.
Odinkalu, in his resignation letter addressed to NBA President, Mr. Yakubu Maikyau, SAN, said: “In a country in which elections are notoriously in disrepute, the NBA has a duty to set high standards in the preparation and conduct of its elections.
“For reasons that I outline below, I have come to the plain conclusion that this aspiration for a credible election in the next cycle of elections in our association in 2024 now faces a clear and present risk of foreseeable frustration.
“In the light of this painful conclusion, I have reconsidered my membership of the ECNBA and hereby tender my resignation from the committee with effect from July 10, 2023.
“The integrity of the NBA’s elections is fundamentally dependent on the credibility of two things: the voting platform (interface) and the membership data. The former is outsourced, while the NBA provides the latter to the ECNBA.
“For the 2022 elections, ECNBA contracted the voting service provision for the sum of N18 million. The organs of the NBA approved this sum as part of the budget for the election.
“As I write, N12.6 million of this sum has so far been paid. One year after the elections took place, we still owe the provider N5.4 million, representing 30 percent of the agreed sum.
“The association has not complained about service standards by the provider nor has it declared a
contractual dispute. It is not the case that the NBA is insolvent.
“This lingering debt damages the commercial and organisational credibility of the ECNBA and of its membership. The voting platform providers who administered the 2022 elections cannot now be enthusiastic about further dealings with a chronic debtor.
“The reputation of the NBA as a chronic debtor or as reluctant to comply with contractual obligations will be well known within the small community of providers of such services in Nigeria. “This surely raises the bar of difficulty for the next election, which is a mere one year from now.
This difficulty may not be fatal if it were to be the only issue that the ECNBA could confront with regard to the next election, but it is not.
“As you are aware, on July 1, 2022, the NBA entered into a contract with a company to, among other things, provide innovative technology service and work process automation to the NBA. The deliverables under this contract included “clean up (of) the database of the NBA for accuracy”.
“This contractor designed and managed the Bar Practising Fee, BPF, payment portal for 2023 which, however, ran into difficulties over allegations of non-fulfilment of contractual obligations
by the NBA with regard to fees owed to the contractor.
“It is my understanding that relations with this contractor may now have broken down irretrievably, that the portal has been deactivated and that the data collected from this portal are not accessible to the NBA because, being indebted to the contractor, it has been denied access to the encryption keys which the contractor can only release after the debts owed to it have been reconciled and cleared.
“These facts have multi-dimensional consequences for all streams of work on which our Association’s next elections depend.
“First, the credibility of underlying data for the next cycle of elections is at best in question with this situation of breakdown in the relationship with the data management contractor.
“Second, with its commercial credit shot and goodwill damaged, the capacity of the ECNBA to have access to a credible election service provider for the next election is now questionable.
“Third, these matters of data credibility and commercial credibility cannot be bridged by the ECNBA alone.
“But fourth, the manner in which you treated the ECNBA’s good-faith inquiry on this and related matters at the last NEC meeting leaves me with genuine doubts as to whether the Committee in fact enjoys your confidence,” he added.