Former NBA President Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, says Nigeria’s Bar should have far greater control over legal education, professional discipline and regulation, arguing that government bureaucracy has weakened the profession’s institutional independence.
Former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Dr Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, has called for far-reaching reform of how the Nigerian legal profession is regulated.
Agbakoba argued that the NBA currently has a powerful public voice but operates within a framework in which significant aspects of professional regulation remain dispersed across statutory institutions.
He questioned a system under which the NBA does not independently control professional discipline, legal education and other central aspects of professional regulation.
Agbakoba compared the position with professions and Bar structures elsewhere that exercise broader regulatory control over admission, discipline and professional standards.
He argued that Nigerian lawyers should ultimately be responsible for determining professional curriculum, ethical standards, and disciplinary consequences.
The intervention raises a major policy question for the profession: whether the next reform of the Legal Practitioners Act should merely adjust existing institutions or fundamentally reposition the NBA as a stronger self-regulatory professional body.
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Source: Vanguard — Agbakoba on the Judiciary and Bar Reform
