Inside the Room: A Full Day at the 10th ICC Africa Conference | ICC Africa Conference Day 2

Day one of the main conference. Lagos. Six sessions, six panels, six completely different conversations - and somehow, by the end of it, they all connected.In this debrief I take you through the full day at the 10th ICC Africa Conference on International Arbitration. We start with the ICC Court President in conversation with two Nigerian energy executives - and the line about trees that framed everything that followed. We move to the bench, where four African judges gave honest accounts of what their courts are actually doing with arbitration - including a Ghana story that stopped the room.Then I tell you about the session I cannot report on - and why that matters for every English-speaking African practitioner who has ever sat in a room where the conversation was happening in a language they could not follow.After that: expedited arbitration nine years on, the new highly expedited procedure that delivers awards in three months, and the uncomfortable question about whether traditional arbitration will still exist in its current form in ten years. Then the professional standing session - Dorothy Ufot SAN tells the story of how she walked into a CIArb examination she knew nothing about in 1999, and what happened next. And we close on digital economy disputes, where in-house counsel from Interswitch and MTN Nigeria tell you what dispute resolution actually looks like when USD 2 billion worth of airtime disappears in an hour.This is a long one. It earns the length.