Mrs. Boma Ozobia (OON) is a scion of the Nembe Kingdom and one of the leading corporate lawyers in the country. She is a partner in the law firm, Sterling Partnership, and the first black and female president of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association (CLA). Ozobia is also a former president of the Association of Women Solicitors in England and Wales. She has authored books and is engaged in mentoring young ladies aspiring to climb the corporate ladder. She spoke to JOHN AUSTIN UNACHUKWU and OKORIE UGURU on her life, career and growing up.
With your background as a former President of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association (CLA), I had a preconceived opinion that I was coming to meet a no-nonsense woman. But you seem to be different from that.
It is different because I don’t see why you cannot enjoy what you are doing. You can be serious minded and productive in what you are doing without being unfriendly and without doing what I commonly do here because people think they have to fit into a box in order to be in a position. I believe that my works speak for me and my achievements speak for themselves.
Beyond that, I am not different from the next person. We are all human beings. We breathe the same air and drink the same water. We want the same things, which are security for the family, individual happiness and the right to pursue our dreams.
I am me, but I have been told that I am easy to get on with. It certainly has its advantages because I make friends easily across the board. It is not just about opening doors. I like people and respect them for who they are, regardless of whether it opens the door or not. It is not based on whether I want something from anybody. It is purely because I am interested in people, I want to know them, I want to help if I can. I think that is what comes first.
How did your journey start in the legal profession?
Interestingly, it has turned full circle because I left Nigeria primarily to go and study in England for Masters in Law but did not return because at that time, we were under a military dictatorship. I could not conceive myself living under such an autocratic rule. As citizens, we had little or no rights. The men in uniform were superior beings and I had had cause to run into them in the university and so on. I know this was not the place I, as a young person, could survive in because I would either have to take the gun from somebody and shoot him or he would have to shoot me. But I refuse to be a lesser Nigerian because you are in uniform. So, that was why my focus was not on coming home to live under that type of condition. Incidentally, we have a former military ruler coming in now as a reformed democrat. So, it has come full circle.
You stayed back in the UK not only practising law but engaging in activism under the aegis of female lawyers for England and the Wales…
Indeed, it was that background that made me develop an interest in human rights and rule of law, which is what the Commonwealth Lawyers Association is about. It is a group of lawyers across the 54 countries and territories coming together over 50 years ago. The rule of law is what underpins the civilization that we know as human beings. The absence of rule of law in my own country was the driver in taking decisions about what I got involved in. The absence of human rights, the arbitrariness of living under military dictatorship drove my interest and participation in those activities which didn’t and still does not earn me money. But it gives me an opportunity to make a difference and to give back, because when you impact positively on your society, it is satisfying in itself. So that was what took me along that pathway.
At a time you became the chairperson of female lawyers in Britain and the Wales…
As a woman, I face the same challenges that every woman who happens to have a career or a job faces. She leaves her home in order to make ends meet. So it is with the market woman that goes into Balogun Market to sell pepper and tomatoes. So, being in England did not make these challenges any different. I saw that there was an association of women solicitors, looking after the interests of women in the profession and trying to resolve the challenges female solicitors were facing. You will be surprised to hear that people are not all that different from Nigeria in that sense. In fact, in some ways, Nigeria is ahead. So, women were admitted to practice as solicitors in England less than 100 years ago. It took an act of parliament to make that happen. Having got the right to do so, it took a lot of time to get the men in the profession to accept us. Even when they accepted us, we were not given the opportunity to work at the same level, neither were we given the same pay.
Even in England?
Yes, up till date. So, at the time I became the chairwoman of the association, remember this is an association that looks after the interest of almost half of the people in the profession, because at that time, women in the profession were over 40,000, nearly 50 per cent. At that point in time, from the statistics that we were able to gather from several very credible sources, because data is kept, it was clear there was a huge disparity in pay between female and male solicitors for doing the same work. Just because you were a woman, you got 27 per cent less. That has improved now. Statistics were released early this year, I think it is about 19 per cent. So, the work we have been doing is progressive. It is making the difference but there is still a lot to be done.
I remember colleagues in England asked me them: why was there an association of female solicitors when there was none for men? Why do you people think you have to have your own association?’ And I said the association of women solicitors exists in order not to make itself extinct. Once we have achieved equality of the genders, we don’t want to be more than men. We just want to have a level playing field, then there will be no need for an association of women solicitors.
So, how did you get into the legal profession?
Law has always been in my family. My grandfather was a magistrate and also the Amayanabo of Nembe Brass, Bayelsa State, which is where the former Minister of Petroleum, Edmund Daukoro, is now. My uncle, the next Amayanabo after him, was a lawyer. The late Chief Justice Ambrose Alagoa was the Chief Justice of the old Rivers State; the first indigenous Chief Justice and a respected lawyer. There are others uncles of mine, including the one that recently retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Stanley Alagoa. He reached the apex. In fact, he in particular, was the one who sparked my interest in Law because one, we had that familiarity in the family. Two, Uncle Stanley was one of my favourite uncles as a child because he was one of those uncles that took time to play with children. Every time he came to the house and invariably he would be coming from the court, he would have his collar and his black suit. He would talk to you, and sometimes he would come along with all those old black and white reel movies. He would set them up for us and we would watch Charlie Chaplin and so on. Not many older people made out that time with little children. Certainly, he was one of my favourite uncles. I wanted to do what he did when I grew up. He was a lawyer.
So it was really about the family, to begin with. I did have an understanding of what the work involved. My late father always said to me: ‘You will make a good lawyer,’ because I was one who would always speak up. In fact when the others didn’t want to tell him something, I would be the one that would say it. And he couldn’t just tell me to do something; he had to explain it to me because I would ask why. He encouraged that. He didn’t think it was an insult; he didn’t think I was rude as some parents do, because a child deserves to understand the logic behind what he is sent to do. He saw it as an opportunity to teach you. And so your why was not seen as confrontational, insulting question; it was seen as a perfectly logical approach and he took his time to then explain to you why.
As I got older, I saw that lawyers made the difference in access to justice, in ensuring that people were treated fairly. And that for me was then my passion, which now takes me here. I am a commercial lawyer in practice.
One would expect you to do more of civil than corporate law.
I agree. I love what I do daily, which is dealing with transactions, looking at legal frameworks and looking at how to deal with the risks. So, when the executive arm of government was overreaching for instance, and not respecting the other arms of government or respecting the constitutional provisions we would intervene, even though it is not a Commonwealth country. For instance, in the United States under former President George Bush, when they started the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, we intervened and we took the case as amicus curia. The United States is not, technically speaking, a Commonwealth country, but the United States Supreme Court said yes the Commonwealth lawyers, your intervention has been very useful in guiding us on how to look at this whole issue. So, in that jurisdiction, that was interesting and useful.
In this jurisdiction, we have challenges with so many things: infrastructure, education and so on. We Nigerians like to think that we are rich, but we are not. This country, in comparison with the number of people we have, is a poor country. If your people’s per capita income is 3,000 dollars a year, please…Singapore is about 40,000 per annum. Malaysia, Indonesia, they are all ahead in per capita income. So think about it. And therefore, government does have very finite resources. Yes, I know about corruption. This means that these finite resources are not being properly applied. If it was being properly applied, your access to justice issues will trickle down the line. Young people and fellow citizens are rotting away in our criminal justice system only because of poverty.
Maybe that is the more reason you ought to be more involved than staying in the corporate world.
I am doing both. I am a corporate lawyer, but what we do, in the tradition of our profession, is to have a budget. The state doesn’t have the budget. There is a cost attached to doing this. You’ve got to file processes and there is a cost attached to it. If you are going to appeal, you’ve got to get records; there is a cost attached to it, and so on. Those costs are met from our pro bono budget which we fund from our corporate work. It enables us to make our own little difference within our society by intervening in those cases where you can see that there is a clear miscarriage of justice or where people have been hauled into detention for lengthy period of time without being charged or allowed to go on bail simply because they didn’t have the funding or the legal aid does its best with the little funding available to it but is unable to do it all.
In 2011, you were the first female lawyer and black to lead the CLA. How did it feel achieving such height?
2011 in Hyderbad, India was a very special conference. For me, it was an opportunity to continue to serve. You were simply the first amongst equals. It is a council, but you had the opportunity to direct and work with colleagues in the direction you feel you should go.
It was special in the reaction. I had colleagues from other African countries come and say how wonderful it was to look up there and see someone like them. It had never happened. What had never happened also was that suddenly there was a queue because everyone wanted to come up and shake my hand. It wasn’t just Africans, contemporaries and colleagues, it was across board. I had members of the British House of Lords who were present as keynote speakers lining up and coming up to shake my hands. That was a humbling experience because it really wasn’t something I was expecting.
With your tight schedule as a partner in a legal firm and head of the organisation, you still go out of your way to author books. However, your books seem to be female inclined?
The books, yes, I wrote from the perspective of what I know which is all I can do. I cannot write a mentoring book for men (laughs). I don’t know your world; I don’t wear your shoes, so I don’t know where they pinch. I can’t write for young women coming after me because I have walked this part and there are certain experiences that I have had, which I have only had because of my gender. So if I can share this information and say with this information, you can create a level playing field for yourself and ensure that you are not unduly disadvantaged in the profession.
Despite your background from a privileged home, you still had the drive to succeed in life. What was the push?
You are right in saying that I was privileged. That is true, and that is what makes me sad when I see the current crop of privileged Nigerians. If you looked closely when the world was commemorating the end of the First World War, then if the people of Great Britain were rationing food, the palace was doing the same. That is the mentality of the generation of Nigerians that brought me up. I was brought up to know that. The first thing my father or mother would tell me was that you are privileged, and privilege comes with responsibility. The privilege is by the grace of God, so you owe it to those who are less privileged to ensure that you do whatever you can to assist. Because it is a privilege you haven’t earned, you started off ahead of somebody else, by accident of birth. Why on earth would you take credit for that?. My drive as a result is to effectively earn the privilege by giving back. That is the way I was brought up and I think that is the right thing to do.
From the way you talk, it seems your father had greater influence on you as a child?
You are absolutely right. You see, you must read the book even though it is written for female lawyers. It will serve as a lesson to every parent. One common thread that runs through the interviews with female lawyers, successful in their own right, is that there was a father who I would say was a feminist. Feminist in the definition of Chimamanada Adichie, is a person who believes in the equality of the sexes and that earned reinforcement from the man in your life who you adore, because a father, for a little child, is next to God. He makes you understand that this is what you are capable of, and nobody can tell you anything different.
So, for parents, fathers are so important in the nurturing of their male and female children that stands them in good stead. By the time they go out and the society begins to knock them, that you are less capable because you are not a man, you don’t believe a word of it because the person who you know and value his opinion has already said a different thing to you. So, you are out there and find out that they are not correct, he is. You are not disabled by your gender, you are equally capable.
It seems being a product of two societies, Nigeria and Britain, has made you to be reticent social wise. You are not loud like the average Nigerian.
I don’t know about being loud or not. I agree with you that in terms of socialising, I may not socialise the way the average Nigerian does. So, you won’t see me at a lot of society functions. There are two reasons for that. One, I actually work very long hours. That means I have limited time for social engagements, and it is by choice because I really like what I do. It is a more useful way of spending my time. If I really go to a social function, it is because that person is really near and dear to me. Time, for me, is extremely valuable and I really have to manage it properly.
How do you unwind then?
Now, that is a different thing entirely. I like activity-based leisure. I sail.
