Tag: Law

 

 

By- Adenekan Shogunle, Esq. Fsi.

The law has always been a noble profession. But nobility, as history reminds us, isn’t automatic; it must be earned, tested, and maintained. Lawyers are human: fallible, ambitious, and sometimes even reckless. What has preserved the dignity of the legal profession in its finest hours is not the claim to nobility but the existence of discipline and professionalism. And therein lies the tragedy of our time.

*The Past and the Present*
Take, for instance, the late Chief Frederick Rotimi Alade Williams, SAN, the great and inimitable “Timi the Law,” doyen of the Nigerian Bar. Few remember that early in his career, he stumbled badly. He was caught trifling with a client’s funds, a widow’s, and was promptly hauled before the disciplinary authorities. It could have ended his career before it began. Instead, the experience reformed him. It chastened him and served notice to an entire generation of lawyers that the Bar had teeth and wasn’t afraid to use them. That brush with accountability produced a Rotimi Williams who went on to embody excellence at the Bar and set a standard for generations of lawyers to emulate.
Now imagine he had gotten away with it. Imagine the impudence, the impunity, and the entitlement that would have followed. That, sadly, is where we find ourselves today.

On September 16, 2025, Nigerians across the world woke up to the breaking news that Judge Ewan Paton, sitting in a property Tribunal in England had found three Nigerian lawyers complicit in fraud and lies. The news was humiliating, not merely because prominent Nigerian lawyers were found to have consciously and brazenly involved themselves in fraud, forgery, and impersonation before a foreign court, but because the revelations barely raised an eyebrow at home. Once, even a whisper of impropriety was enough to summon the disciplinary hammer. Today, disgrace abroad is water under the bridge. No shaking! The watchmen of the profession are asleep, and the thieves among us continue to walk freely in silk.
The problem isn’t that lawyers sometimes fail; they always have and always will. The problem is that when they fail nowadays, there are no consequences. All our accountability structures, disciplinary committees, professional oversight, and the moral authority of elders at the Bar have atrophied. The profession has lost its immune system.
The law is still noble. It has not changed. What has changed is that too many of those who claim to lead the profession no longer fear discipline. They wear rank as armor, wield connections as shields, and perform their fraud with impunity. Worse, they have become the face of the profession, overshadowing the many quiet, diligent lawyers who still practice with integrity.

*The Problem With the “Big Names”*

Some analysts have concluded that legal practice is full of chicanery and champartinous charlatans. We must stop consoling ourselves with the fiction that the whole profession is rotten. It is not. But if we continue to leave the rogues unchallenged, they will define us. They will teach the next generation that law is nothing but theatre, fraud in a wig and gown. And when that day comes, the tragedy will not be that the practice of law ceased to be noble. The tragedy will be that legal practitioners, through silence and complicity, chose to be ignoble. By then, it will no longer matter that law itself is noble. It will only matter that lawyers have ceased to be.

The recent judgment of Judge Ewan Paton in the case of Tali Shani v. Chief Mike Agbedor Abu Ozekhome & Ors is the sort of courtroom drama Nigerians dread: three of our own “big-time lawyers” parading themselves before a UK tribunal as if legal practice were a comedy of errors, except, sadly, it was fraud, not farce.
The findings were brutal. Chief (Prof.) Michael Ozekhome, SAN, CON, OFR, a man who the court says styles himself a “big-time lawyer” and a holder of two of Nigeria’s prestigious national honors was caught peddling fabrications so clumsy that the judge mocked his grasp of basic evidence law.

His profile, posted prominently on his personal website, and reproduced here verbatim, states as follows:

*A PROFILE OF PROF MIKE A. A. OZEKHOME, SAN, CON, OFR, Ph.D.*

*INTRODUCTION*
Prof. Mike Ozekhome, SAN, CON, OFR, SAM, SANS, FCIArb, LL.B (Hons), BL, LL.M, MA (HC), Ph.D, LL.D, D.Litt, D.A, JD, D.Phil, D.Arts, HonDL, DHL, D.Sc, DLE, KSM, DSSRS, is a leading Constitutional Lawyer; Human Rights Activist; Pro-Democracy Campaigner; Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON); Officer of the Federal Republic (OFR); Professor of Constitutional Law; Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN); Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM); Senior Advocate of Nigerian; Social Critic; Public Affairs Analyst; Pro-masses Advocate; Knight of Students (SANS); Voice of the People (VOP); Bencher; Notary Public of Nigeria; Patriot; Pan-Nigerian; Pan-Africanist; Author; Researcher; Scholar; Court Room Gladiator; Multi-Columnist; Philosopher; Thinker; Motivational Speaker, Knight of the Order of St. Mulumba (KSM); Chartered Arbitrator; Conciliator; Negotiator; and, Mediator.

*EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS*
This pro-masses prodigy attended St. Mary’s Catholic Primary School, Iviukwe, and St. Peter’s College, Agenebode, where he made the best graduating results in 1969 and 1974, respectively. He later briefly attended the Baptist Academy, Lagos, in 1975, before being admitted to the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife. He graduated in law in 1980, at the tender age of 23. He was called to the Bar in 1981, after passing the Bar exams at the Nigerian Law School, Lagos. Ozekhome later obtained his *Ph.D degree in Constitutional Law from Alliance International University, Lusaka, Zambia.*
Prof. Mike Ozekhome holds the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B Hons) degree; Barrister at Law (BL); 2 Master’s degrees in Law (LL.M); and another Master’s degree of Arts (M.Arts). He is also a recipient of *15 honorary Doctorate Degrees (honoris causa), including a Ph.D by thesis from the Alliance International University, Lusaka, Zambia*. These degrees include Doctor of Laws (LL.D); Doctor of Letters (D.Litt); Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil); Doctor of Business Administration (DA); Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD); Doctor of Arts (D.Arts); Doctor of Science (D.Sc); Doctor of Leadership and Entrepreneurial Studies (DLE); Doctor of Humane Law (DHL), etc, from various Universities spread across the globe; Nigeria, USA, United Kingdom, Israel, Zambia, Turks, Carcos Island; and Belize, Central America.
A basic online search shows that The Alliance International University is an unaccredited university in the Caribbean, which formerly operated from Lusaka, Zambia. It has been described as “an online scam” by Undark Magazine. According to its own website, the Alliance International University is founded by “Holy International Ministries.” It has no physical campus, and all its activities take place online. Similar details apply to the many other unnamed “international universities” from which “Prof.” Michael Ozekhome claims to have obtained his many academic degrees. For many years, Mike Ozekhome was a walking, living, practicing fraud right before our eyes until he took his pernicious artistry beyond our shores.

Kingsley Efemuai, dually qualified in Nigeria and England, could not even bother to confirm the existence of his client, who, it turned out, may as well have been a ghost. And Mohammed Edewor? He brought in a doctored phone bill as “proof” of identity. Forgery by airtime.
The Real Crisis
With details this sordid, it is easy to throw up our hands and declare, as one commentator did, that “no one can ever have confidence in our profession.” Tempting, but lazy. The problem is not “our profession.” The problem is the small club of lawyers who mistake rank and robes for a license to commit fraud with flourish.
Law is still noble. Some lawyers are not. They are merely human and, despite a legal training and experience designed to elevate their person and persona, have chosen to remain at the basest level of humanity; motivated only by greed and avarice.
The real crisis is leadership. When the faces of the bar are silk-wearing tricksters and microphone-thumping “defenders of the rule of law,” what trickles down is not inspiration but cynicism. Ordinary lawyers toil away in chambers, drafting contracts, guiding clients, and keeping the wheels of justice turning. But their good work is eclipsed each time a “big name” struts into a foreign court and is unmasked as a fraud in a wig and gown.
To say we should lose confidence in the entire profession is to let these “big-time lawyers” off too easily. No! Confidence must be lost only in them, not in the profession. And consequences must follow. A profession that does not police its own will soon be policed by others, and there is no dignity in that.

The law has not failed us. Certain lawyers have failed the law.
The tragedy is not that lawyers fail, it is that failure now carries no consequence. When the Bar stops policing itself, the world will do it for us.

And the sting in this tale is simple: the more we allow dishonest lawyers to be our public face, the more the world will believe that legal practice in Nigeria is a punchline for avarice and fraud.

– Adenekan Shogunle is a Nigerian lawyer and writer based in Abuja. He writes frequently on law, governance, and public ethics.

 

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In 1981, Chief Gani Fawehinmi was already 16 years at the Nigerian Bar and one of its brightest stars. He had also become a pioneer in the enterprise of legal publishing and a breakout litigator. One decade earlier, Gani had served as national publicity secretary of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).  Among lawyers of his generation or, in fact, any other active at the Bar, few could claim to be more accomplished.

The rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), the hallmark of excellence in legal practice in Nigeria, was a mere six years old at the time. Then, as now, the Legal Practitioners Privileges Committee (LPPC) was the statutory body established to consider and determine eligible applicants for the rank. As always, it was chaired by the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN). By any measure, Gani Fawehinmi was more than eligible to take the rank in 1981.

However, instead of sending him to the LPPC,  the then-Attorney-General of the Federation, Richard Akinjide, a SAN since 1978 and eighth on the all-time list of SANs, sent Gani to the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC) for a supposedly high professional crime of daring to announce the existence of a path-breaking law reporting enterprise in which he was engaged. As the Attorney-General of the Federation, Akinjide happened to sit on the LPPC and was also the chair of the LPDC. Vocational or institutional independence for the legal profession was alien to this design.

The complaint against Gani seemed pre-determined. So, he sued. When Candide Ademola Johnson, Chief Judge of Lagos State, ruled in Gani’s favour at the first instance, Akinjide’s LPDC was unhappy. They appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal (as it was called then) and lost. An implacable LPDC appealed to the Supreme Court. Four years after Gani first sued, in July 1985, the Supreme Court tossed out the appeal of Akinjide’s LPDC with a unanimous judgment in Gani’s favour.

With a case pending before the courts over the lawfulness of the plan by the legal establishment to throw the kitchen sink at him, Gani was frozen out of consideration for elevation to the rank of SAN. His credentials were irrelevant. Indeed, it was rumoured with more than a modest whiff of credibility that he was approached with an offer to concede the legal proceedings in return for a favourable consideration for elevation to the rank. He reportedly declined.

By the time the Supreme Court decided the case in July 1985, the cast of actors had changed, and the issues became even more interesting. At the end of September 1983, Akinjide ceased to be the Attorney-General of the Federation and also departed as the chair of the LPDC. When the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in July 1985, the LPDC chair was Chike Offodile, then Attorney-General to military ruler, Muhammadu Buhari.

By then, Gani was already deep in another battle with the legal profession on how to approach Gen. Buhari’s military and anti-corruption tribunals. The NBA asked lawyers to boycott them; Gani refused. The month after the Supreme Court rendered its judgment in Gani’s favour in 1985, the Buhari regime was overthrown.

Bola Ajibola, the new Attorney-General of the Federation, was the president of the Bar whose call on lawyers to boycott the military tribunals went unheeded by Gani. Unsurprisingly, when Gani’s name came up the following year for consideration for the rank of SAN, it ended up in the bin. In September 2001, more than two decades after he emerged as perhaps the most eligible to take the rank, Nigeria’s legal and political establishments yielded ground and finally conceded the rank of SAN to Gani Fawehinmi.

Gani’s is the most obvious and most willful exclusion from the rank, and for political reasons. He is by no means the only one.  Alao Aka Basorun, a former president of the NBA, and Kanmi Isola Osobu, the late lawyer to Afrobeat icon Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, were two others apparently passed over due to their ideological leanings.

Political reasons similarly explain why former Attorney-General of the Federation, Olu Onagoruwa, was passed over for the rank until 2014, when he was too unwell to attend the investiture.

Among the living, former Attorney-General of Lagos and former Chair of the Body of Benchers, Hairat Balogun; Ayo Obe; and Jide Ogundipe are three examples of outstanding litigators whose exclusion from the SAN rank casts aspersions on any claims to objectivity in the decision-making process for its conferment.

When, therefore, he claimed in a release on 18 August 2025 that the conferment of the rank of SAN “is not a political appointment, nor is it an executive patronage”, former General Secretary of the NBA, Olumuyiwa Akinboro SAN (who is also running to be the next president of the Nigerian Bar), indulged in both historical inaccuracy and factual revisionism. He was wrong on both claims and he knew it. Mr. Akinboro’s beef was with the requirement for the State Security Service (SSS) to screen candidates for elevation to the rank of SAN.

It is worth noting what Mr. Akinboro chose not to see. First, the requirement for the screening by the SSS is contained in the Guidelines for the Conferment of the rank of SAN made in October 2022 by then CJN and Chair of the LPPC, Olukayode Ariwoola.

Second, those Guidelines specifically required the screening to be conducted respectively by three agencies: the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and the SSS. Mr. Akinboro could not be bothered to acknowledge that these were rules made by the CJN; nor did he notice that they also required the EFCC and the ICPC to do the same.

Third, Mr. Akinboro justified his intervention with an emotive appeal to the need not to compromise the rank of SAN and to preserve the “independence of the courts”. Perhaps he did not know that the rules on judicial appointments made by the National Judicial Council (NJC) also require that a recommendation for judicial appointment from the Judicial Service Commission shall be accompanied by a “report by the Department of State Security (sic) on the suitability of the candidate for appointment to a Judicial Office supported by verifiable facts on which the report is based.” The agency referred to here as “Department of State Security” is the same one that the SAN Guidelines call SSS. Mr. Akinboro sees nothing wrong with candidates for judicial appointments going through the same process, which he says intrudes into the independence of the SAN application process. Apparently, to him, what is bad for the rank of SAN is good for the judiciary.

These ebullitions from Mr. Akinboro and his ilk do not come from a place of principle. It is not about the independence of the legal profession, nor is it about a commitment to professional excellence. Instead, these kinds of views seek assurances of privilege for a few procured at the expense of the many and all under the convenient artifice of “independence” of the legal profession.

Interestingly, this occurs in the week that the NBA begins its annual general conference in Enugu, Eastern Nigeria, under an ironic theme: “Stand Out; Stand Tall.” A Bar and a legal profession that lack independence cannot stand out or stand tall. An independent legal profession would have challenged the Ariwoola Guidelines promptly in 2022 rather than wait three years to misrepresent their import for cheap politics. In any case, a CJN would not be the person making the rules for the quality mark of an independent Bar.

Independence of the legal profession is not a privilege handed out on a platter. It is fought for. Lack of independence is a congenital design flaw in the institutions of Nigeria’s legal profession. For the record, regimes of exceptionalism such as that advocated for by Mr. Akinboro, do not advance the cause of independence. That is not to say that independence is not a desirable goal. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that Nigeria’s legal profession is nowhere near that goal. Identifying the steps required to get there could usefully preoccupy the NBA when it meets in Enugu this week.

*A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu*

 

 

By Sylvester Udemezue

(A). *STATEMENT BY LEARNED OLAYINKA SOKOYA:*

_*”@⁨SYLVESTER UDEMEZUE (airtel)⁩y leader sir, all members of Egbe are bound by the constitution of Egbe Amofin Oodua and the resolution at the AGM. This resolution was reached at the AGM and I think the right thing for members to do is to abide by the resolution of the body they subscribed to even if it’s not favourable to them.”*_

(B). *HUMBLE RESPONSE BY UDEMS:*

Thank you very much for your gracious reply. I am most grateful, Sir. However, I have a few concerns and would greatly appreciate your guidance on the following points:

1. Between a resolution of Egbe Amofin and the Constitution of the NBA, which takes precedence?

2. As you know, under the NBA Constitution, every lawyer from the Western Zone of the NBA (particularly from the South-West, whose turn it is by virtue of the internal rotation provisions) is entitled, if constitutionally qualified, to contest for the office of NBA President in 2026. Can Egbe Amofin, by any resolution passed at any of its forums, validly restrict the right of any such qualified lawyer from the West to contest?

3. What is the constitutional validity of any Egbe Amofin resolution that purports to prevent a qualified lawyer from the Western Zone (especially the South-West) from contesting the NBA Presidency in 2026?

4. Do you not think that the principle of ultra vires may apply here, especially because, while I agree with you that all members of Egbe Amofin are bound by its Constitution and resolutions, this would only hold where Egbe Amofin is reasonably shown to have acted intra vires?

5. Would it not be more strategic for Egbe Amofin at this stage to:

(a) insist on strict enforcement by the NBA leadership of the constitutional provisions on the internal rotation of the NBA Presidency, which, by all interpretations, favours the South-West producing the next NBA President in 2026;

or

(b) enter into constructive and fraternal engagement with the Mid-West Bar Forum, persuading them to refrain from fielding candidates in 2026, thereby leaving the field open for the South-West, while allowing all qualified aspirants from the South-West to freely contest?

6. My dear Mr. Sokoya, the right to elect the NBA President in 2026 belongs to all eligible lawyers from the 36 states of Nigeria and the FCT, not exclusively to members of Egbe Amofin. Could it not then be said that Egbe Amofin lacks the locus to dictate to all Nigerian lawyers who should be their NBA President in 2026? By adopting Mr. Akinboro, SAN, and directing other aspirants to step aside, does this not amount, in effect, to Egbe Amofin purporting to select the NBA President for the 2026–2028 term/tenure? I agree that it is the South-West’s turn, but that only means the NBA President must be elected from the South-West, not by only the South-West. The correct interpretation of the NBA Constitution is that members of the NBA should elect a President from the South-West, not that Egbe Amofin should select and present one for the entire association. Would you not agree, Sir?

7. Why then should Egbe Amofin continue to apply the same approach whenever it is the West’s turn to produce the NBA President, yet expecting a different result? If the same method has been used repeatedly without producing the desired outcome, is it not time to try a different approach?

8. These questions are addressed to you personally, but by extension they are also directed at Egbe Amofin. George Santayana’s words remain true: *“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat its mistakes.”* Nothing will change unless we change our methods. We all know the right thing to do; the real challenge is summoning the will to do it.

I am grateful in anticipation of your gracious response, which will help advance this important discussion.

Yours faithfully,
Sylvester Udemezue (Udems)
Proctor, The Reality Ministry of Truth, Law and Justice (TRM)
Tel: 08021365545
Email: udems@therealityministry.ngo
(15 August 2025)