Asue Ighodalo is Chairman of the Council of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Section on Business Law, SBL. In this interview, he takes a look at his tenure in office and speaks on the on-going SBL annual conference in Abuja. Excerpts:

AS Chairman of  NBA-SBL,  what has been your experience?

First of all, I would like to say that it has been a great privilege to serve as the Chairman of Council of the SBL and pilot the affairs of the Section for two years. I have had the opportunity to interact with my colleagues and to lead a section of the NBA that is very dynamic, comprises hard working and innovative practitioners.

I am grateful for the opportunity given me by  the President and the National Executive Committee of the NBA, the Council and the members of the SBL to serve first as the Vice-Chairman for two years and then as the chairman for another term of two years. It has really been a wonderful, but humbling experience heading an organisation of colleagues and peers.

My experience has been very enriching and I am truly grateful for  the opportunity to serve and to put in place some of my  ideas as to the way the SBL should progress. I can say that my two years has been more or less a continuum from Mr. Gbenga Oyebode’s two years which was the  tenure before mine.

Which other committees made your tenure a memorable one?

We also set up a committee on publicity and research which is chaired by Ms. Theodora Kio-Lawson. That committee has also worked very hard and has helped in publicising the activities of the section and has also created two active virtual journals, a monthly and a quarterly.

Judicial decisions

Members of SBL contribute articles to the Journals and  they are sent to  members of the SBL and to our other stakeholders.  The journals discuss and highlight contemporary legal and economic issues, judicial decisions, recently enacted laws, and laws under consideration in the National Assembly. Again I am very grateful to that committee.

The committee has also helped to improve our membership drive to increase and extend our membership across all the nooks and cranny of Nigeria. For some time now, people have erroneously viewed the SBL as a Section of the NBA, for certain lawyers in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Ibadan.  Commercial and business law is practiced all over the country and we want our membership to cut across the whole country so we have been working hard to correct this impression and create a totally inclusive Section.

Most of our other 19 committees have been very active, through the year and their activities have been well publicized and well attended .I sincerely thank all the committee chairmen for the support they have given to the Council and the work they are doing. As you are aware, the committees are the life wires of the SBL and the functionality of the committees determines how well the SBL does through that period. I am really grateful, many of our committee chairmen have given a lot of their time and resources to make sure that their committees perform very well, they and the committee executives have really done a lot work.

What efforts have you made to improve our commercial laws and improve the cost of doing business in Nigeria?

We have increased our interaction with the National Assembly. We are a bit more active in working with  in looking and at draft bills, and coming up with our own ideas, views and commentaries on these draft bills. I like to thank all the members of the committees that I have called upon at short notice to intervene and to represent us at public hearings and to propagate SBL’s views on a lot of these bills that are on their way to being enacted into laws.

We have been working with the Senate, DFID, NESG,  and their appointed consultants, led by Prof Paul Idornigie, SAN, reviewing business and commercial laws that need to be amended, repealed and new ones enacted to create an enabling business environment and enhance growth. I will like to thank the Senate, particularly the Senate President for the foresight and hard work that has gone into this.

It is fundamental that we improve our business climate. The way things are going, we need to create the kind of environment where we have serious business people coming to invest in Nigeria. From where we are today, it appears to be an up hill task but if we start by or amending or repealing our outdated and investment unfriendly laws the environment will be more conducive and we will be able to follow the footsteps of countries like Georgia who have been able to move from low rankings in the ease of doing business index to  very high rankings,  among the top 10.

I think that it is doable, we just need to be focused. I commend the work that the Senate has been doing in this regard and also the House of Representatives. As you are aware, recently there was a National Assembly joint forum with Capital Markets Operators, looking at Capital Market laws. I view this as a proactive intervention. The SBL has been involved in different ways in these interventions.

You paid a courtesy call on the Registrar General of the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC, what was the outcome of that visit?

The Council of the SBL took a decision to meet with regulators and open up avenues of dialogue and collaboration. We decided to start with the CAC. We met with the Registrar General and his executives to discuss areas where we can collaborate to make the CAC even more users friendly and also ensure our colleagues act appropriately in accessing the CAC. I thank the Registrar General of the CAC who has been extremely accommodating, understanding and collaborative.

We have a joint working committee of the SBL and the CAC, they meet periodically nearly every month where we bring the issues from practitioners forward to our regulator the CAC,   the CAC brings up its own issues and we try to synchronize the issues so that we can have a better structured, more active, more understanding CAC that is available to efficiently  assist lawyers in their business . We have also worked jointly with the CAC to put together certain training activities.

I hope that this collaboration will be sustained. It is one of the things I will like to uphold as a success story in the last two years and we are of the hope that we will replicate this with one or two other regulator. I am hoping that with that kind of interface, the relationship between practitioners and regulators will improve and be strengthened.

What are the highlights and expectations from the on-going SBL conference in Abuja?

The theme of our conference this year is ‘Law Reform and Economic Development’ that dovetails into what I discussed earlier, the work of the National Assembly in  reforming our laws.

It is clear in our minds that for us to be able to have the leap- frog economic growth and diversification that we require in Nigeria, particularly now that the pricing of the mainstay of our economy and the pricing of mineral products are falling so drastically in the world market, if we have well reformed, effectively enacted, appropriate and compliant laws, it will then be easier for those who seek to come and invest in our economy to do so.

Most importantly we need laws laws  that will enhance capital formations, infrastructure development, education, security and ensure prompt and effective dispute resolution processes.

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