Ifunanya Excel Grant, a young lawyer from Aba and social media sensation, known as ‘Baddest Lawyer’, has spoken out regarding the recent petition from the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) to the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC) regarding an alleged misconduct.
The NBA’s complaints against Miss Ifunanya centred on her social media notoriety of posting pictures and videos of herself unclad and smoking marijuana.
Reacting to the petition, Ifunnaya in a TikTok video, insisted that at the moment, she wasn’t a practising attorney.
According to Ifunanya, there are a tonne of fictitious social media pages with her name, and that the majority of the publicly available materials could have been simply altered to fit the narrative being disseminated.
She further clarified that her social media activities are meant to advance her career as a model, singer, and actress and do not reflect on her legal training and qualification.
She said,
“If I keep quiet, it is going to be an admission of guilt. It is good for me to come out and actually clear my name. First and foremost, forget the fact that I am popular on social media. I would like to state that there are so many fake accounts of me. There are over 20 on Instagram.
“Likewise on Twitter, Twitter is even worse because I have never been on the app. I have never ever been on Twitter for one day. But there are tons of accounts. All these accounts you can see (on Twitter), they are all fake pages with my name or my face. And I think it is because ever since Twitter started a policy of payment for verification they’ve lost the moral. They no longer ask people to provide identification before they verify. They just verify anyone willing to pay them.
“Secondly, I am not a practising lawyer. I am a lawyer by book. I am not practising. At least for now, I don’t have any interest to practise, maybe some days in the future. But right now, I am not practising.
“I am a model. I am an actress. I am an upcoming musician, a rapper to be precise. Everything I do, everything I post is just for entertainment purposes. It has nothing to do with my legal career. I am not practising law. I don’t have the intention to practice law for now. So right now, my focus is on entertainment.
“Before I even became a lawyer, I was a model. I have always been a model. I have always been into music, I have always been an actress. Lawyer is just one of the numerous things I am. I am thinking about hustling. Living my own thing. Everything I post on social media, I act in my capacity as a model, as an actress, an upcoming musician and as an upcoming rapper.
“I also want us to point out the fact that social media is not a real place. A lot of things can be doctored, manipulated, exaggerated to seem larger than it really is.”
Meanwhile, the Aba branch of the NBA in a statement made on Tuesday and signed by the branch’s chairman, Innocent Egwu and Secretary, K.C. Okoro, debunked claim that Ifunanya is one of its members, saying she is “unknown” to them.
It added that the NBA seeks to ensure that law-abiding lawyers are not ‘held out in bad light’, while at the same time, getting rid of the ‘few bad ones’.
It stated,
“For the records, we wish to state categorically that Miss Ifunanya Excel Grant is not a member of the NBA, Aba Branch, and she is unknown to NBA, Aba Branch.
“While we support every effort of our great association, the NBA, to rid the legal profession of the few bad eggs, we must request that painstaking efforts be taken by officers concerned to ensure that innocent and law-abiding practitioners are not unwittingly held out in bad light to the public.”
