Fiona Onasanya is a Nigerian, although she never lived in any part of the country. She was born and raised in the United Kingdom. She would go on to become a lawyer, and a Member of Parliament (MP) in Britain.
Her ultimate ambition was anything but ordinary: To become the first black female Prime Minister of her country of birth
As things stand, that dream has suffered an abortion, triggered by the eclampsia of zero integrity.
The failed delivery started shortly after 10pm on 24 July 2017, when her car was caught on CCTV camera clocking 41mph on the Causeway of Thorney, Cambridgeshire. That area is a 30mph zone.
Upon investigation, she told the Police that she wasn’t the person behind the wheels on the said night. She insisted that it was her brother, Festus Onasanya, who was the driver.
The former Labour MP who rose to the position of Party Whip, it was found, had connived with her brother to name one Aleks Antipow, her sibling’s former lodger, as the driver. Unfortunately, that alibi wasn’t water tight.
Antipow was with his parents in Russia, 1,800 miles away, at the time of this fateful driving.
This string of lies would become the undoing of Onasanya, who was a former commercial property lawyer. At the Old Bailey trial, she was found guilty and jailed for three months for perverting the course of Justice, as lying is deemed.
Neither did her brother escape the long arm of the law as he bagged 10 months behind bars for making himself available for conspiracy.
Promptly, the Labour Party launched a successful recall proceeding, and deposed her as an MP for Peterborough.
You would have thought she had suffered enough for lying- a routine misdeed for many. But in that event, that wasn’t the opinion of the British legal profession umpire!
The Solicitors Tribunal held a disciplinary hearing on Onasanya, for lying to evade consequences of speed limit breach.
Seemingly remorseless, she arrived the hearing with her mother where she held on to her browbeaten line that she was innocent.
In the face of her insistence, the tribunal took the view that she had failed to act with integrity, that she acted dishonestly and failed to maintain the trust the public placed in her.
The Chair of the three- member panel, which sat in Central London, Edward Nally summed up the matter this way: *”As a parliamentarian makes the law, so a solicitor must uphold the law and rule of law and sadly in this case Ms Onasanya has failed in those duties. We must strike off Onasanya from the roll of solicitors”.
With those words, Onasanya who qualified as a lawyer in November 2015, and worked in the lucrative area of commercial property law before becoming an MP in June 2017, will now seek gainful employment in any profession where integrity is not a critical qualification.
Lying is an unpassable wrongdoing.
This is the message spelt out clearly by the Onasanya experience.
On the other hand, the everyday Nigerian might wonder what the big deal is about lying, let alone about the speed with which a car was driven. Some others might even ask in sarcasm, ‘was anyone killed by the speed?’ There goes the mindset that sets integrity alight.
MSD Reminds you to Act Leaderly and insist that in any event, the standard for leaders, as captured by the solicitors’ panel, is MATCHLESS INTEGRITY!
EVERYTHING RISES AND FALLS ON LEADRSHIP!
Posted with due permission from the author
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