Stop handing your profession to lousy politicians – Ezekwesili to lawyers

Oby Ezekwesili, former education minister, has urged Nigerian lawyers to take responsibility in rescuing the country from what she described as the stranglehold of corrupt politicians, warning that the poor are paying the highest price for the failures of the elite.

Speaking at the just-concluded Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Annual General Conference in Enugu, Ezekwesili accused the country’s elite of abandoning their duty to the masses, leaving over 133 million Nigerians trapped in “intractable poverty.”

“What’s going on is an abandonment of responsibility by the elite of our country. The truth is, the people of this country, the larger population of the poor, are almost trapped in intractable poverty. Some 133 million are perniciously in that state of poverty,” she told the gathering of lawyers.

She stressed that the legal profession plays a decisive role in shaping governance through the rule of law and must therefore examine its own responsibility.

“The lawyers determining the rule of law of this society and what is rewarded, what is punished, are the heart of it,” she said. “Should there be an evaluation of what our profession has done to provide the necessary guardrails for the behavior of our political class?”

Ezekwesili lamented that Nigeria has become a society where politics, rather than hard work and innovation, is rewarded.

“This country has to go back to rewarding hard work. This idea that politics is the pathway to becoming wealthy is an anomaly,” she declared. “Any profession that is rewarding this kind of prebendalist behavior cannot be a profession that cares about tomorrow.”

She challenged lawyers not to “trade” their profession for short-term gains or allow it to be “handed over to a bunch of lousy politicians that want to destroy generations here and unborn.”