A former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Chief Wole Olanipekun (SAN), has urged Nigerian lawyers to sanitise the judiciary by weeding out the bad elements in the fold in order to maintain the legal profession’s integrity.
The legal icon urged the Bar and Bench to bring the corrupt ones in the profession to justice, and flush them out of the system lest they rubbish other good practitioners.
He urged the stakeholders to join the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, to sanitise the judiciary system.
The former NBA president also advised lawyers to avoid what he called pull-him-down syndrome and rather build on legacies of the fathers of the legal profession.
Olanipekun gave the advice yesterday while delivering a keynote address at the 70th anniversary of the Ibadan Branch of NBA at the Afe Babalola Bar Centre at Iyaganku in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital.
The eminent lawyer noted that “lawyers today are only good in pull-him-down syndrome, instead of building on what the fathers of the legal profession had built in Ibadan branch 70 years ago”.
The former NBA president hailed the Ibadan branch for helping in developing the Nigerian Constitution.
He recalled that the late Premier of defunct Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was among the first to set up legal practice in the interior of Yoruba land in 1947.
Olanipekun traced the history of the Ibadan branch to great lawyers, like Harrison Obafemi (enrolled on January 16, 1924); S. A. Ogunleye (enrolled on January 3, 1953), and Omotola Adegunwa (enrolled on January 3, 1953).