Not easy running large law partnership – Emuwa
Partnerships like yours hardly survive in Nigeria. How did you get this far? We are a full service law firm, established in 2004 when four firms came together to form this partnership. Today, we are over 60 lawyers in three offices. We have offices in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. We also have an office […]
Partnerships like yours hardly survive in Nigeria. How did you get this far?
We are a full service law firm, established in 2004 when four firms came together to form this partnership. Today, we are over 60 lawyers in three offices. We have offices in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. We also have an office in Accra, Ghana. We cover all the main commercial areas such as aviation, energy, oil and gas, mining, taxation, corporate commercial as well as a strong dispute resolution department that does arbitration and litigation at the courts led by a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).
It is not easy to run a firm of this size without having more than one partner. You can’t have one partner with that number of lawyers because the role of managing the business would be difficult for one person alone to handle. Any firm that is of this size must have several partners in order to operate smoothly. So, we have several partners, that is what it means to be a partnership.
How does a law firm surpass these challenges to become an enduring one, such as we find in other jurisdictions?
One thing we did when we started was to avoid having the names of the founding partners as the name of the firm. So we chose a neutral name – Aelex, so that new partners thereafter would not feel that they needed to have their names added to the name of the firm. So the idea was from the very beginning. We were looking into the future to say that we need to avoid these problems from the beginning.
What do you think about governance and leadership in Nigeria? Should it be different from what we see today?
I don’t think there is anything wrong with the system of governance and leadership we have today. It is not about the system itself, but more about how a system is operated. Truth is, good systems can be run badly. All around the world there are different systems of government and leadership and these differ from one country to the other. The system of administration in Britain is not the same as in France. It is not the same as it is run in Spain or Italy or the United States of America. But in each case, if they have certain elements like transparency and the willingness to do the right thing, they will succeed. If you borrow those systems, you can run them badly. So it is not about the system, but about those who make the system work.
What sort of laws or legislations would help the process?
Some of these laws already exist. Like I said earlier, there is nothing that cannot be run badly. So, it is not so much about having a law that prescribes a particular type of behaviour. The question is: will people follow these prescribed laws? And when they fail to follow these prescriptions would there be consequences? If there is no consequence, I have no doubt that over time people would be unwilling to follow the prescription.
Yes, there are laws against bribery. There are laws against corruption. Nobody is in doubt that corruption is illegal but that has not stopped it, including the procurement act that has been repeatedly violated. So it’s not about the absence of law, it is the fact that there is no consequence when the laws are violated.
How did a law firm get into the business of discussing national issues as a part of its annual calendar? Do you think lawyers have a fundamental role to play here?
We are primarily a law firm and our objective with the annual lecture is mainly to provide a forum or a platform where ideas are exchanged. We are not trying to become the government. If the ideas are put out there, governments and institutions that find them useful could make use of them.
Why do you think the theme, ‘Making States Work’ is relevant to the nation at this time?
You know we have 36 states in Nigeria and in the last year or two, a number of these states have become challenged in terms of paying salaries, and investing in infrastructures. The question we are all asking is: What does the decline in oil price really mean for Nigerians? Does it mean all the states would gradually wind down and come to a halt? Or is there something that can be done to make them work?
Truth is making states work is not just a matter of finance, but there are a number of elements that must come into play.
Can you tell us some of these elements?
My first instance would be an agrarian state. What should a state that is big on agriculture do to encourage or enhance productivity and economic activity in its state? It could be helping them build roads to move their goods or produce out of their farms, or is it about helping them with irrigation or providing them with security so that the produce is not stolen overnight, which is a common problem in some places? So indeed, there are a number of elements at play here.
There is also the social contract and where the state relies on taxation, it would be easier to do so. Lagos State is a good example of a state which has discovered efficient ways to collect taxes or to have the tax payer pay more willingly; more so, where the tax payer knows that the tax would be put to good use. Lagos has over the years been investing in infrastructure, and therefore it has become easier for the state to go to the open market to encourage the traders there to pay some amount of money as tax every year. This process has been almost hitch free, as they are all happy to pay because they see what Lagos State is doing.
I can tell you that it would be more difficult to do this in a state where the tax payer has no access to any form of social amenities and where the government cannot show what it does with the taxes collected. Again, these are some of the elements required to make a state work. Tax collection does not have to be forceful where provisions are made for residents and citizens.