Panel puts enforcement, institutional reform and citizens’ lived experience at the centre of the debate. Questions why Nigeria has enough laws yet, accountability keep failing.
PORT HARCOURT — Nigeria does not have a shortage of laws, courts or institutions designed to hold public power accountable. What it continues to struggle with is making those mechanisms deliver results for ordinary citizens.
That was one of the central challenges thrown up at a Nigerian Bar Association Section on Public Interest and Development Law (NBA-SPIDEL) session at the NBA Annual General Conference in Port Harcourt, where leading lawyers, academics, public officials and civil-society voices questioned whether public interest law in Nigeria has become too focused on litigation and too detached from the institutional failures it is meant to correct.
The session, held on Wednesday 26 August 2026 at the Chief Ebele Nwokike Hall, Yakubu Gowon Stadium, was themed “Beyond Limits: Reimagining Public Interest Law for Justice, Accountability and Sustainable Development in Nigeria.”
The discussion confronted an uncomfortable reality: landmark judgments may establish important legal principles, yet the institutions responsible for implementing them can remain largely unchanged.
The implication, speakers and panellists argued, is that winning a case cannot always be equated with winning the public-interest battle.
Opening the session, the moderator and Vice Chairman of NBA-SPIDEL, Paul Daudu, SAN, challenged lawyers to rethink the traditional emphasis on constitutional litigation, fundamental rights enforcement and challenges to government action.
Litigation remains essential, he noted, particularly where citizens have no other effective protection against arbitrary power. But the measure of public-interest law should extend beyond the judgment itself to the impact that follows.
The challenge, he suggested, is to move from legal victories to lasting institutional change and from responding to violations after they occur to developing systems that prevent them.
‘Why does the accountability deficit remain?’
The question became the organising theme of the discussion.
Nigeria has a Constitution, legislation, courts, regulatory agencies, anti-corruption institutions and a growing body of jurisprudence. Yet failures of accountability remain widespread.
The panel was asked to confront the gap between the country’s extensive legal framework and the experience of citizens who continue to encounter abuse of power, weak institutions, limited access to justice and poor enforcement of legal decisions.
Former Minister of Aviation, Osita Chidoka, brought the perspective of governance from within government, examining where accountability mechanisms break down once laws and policies move from paper into administration.
The discussion raised a fundamental issue for public-interest lawyers: whether courts are sometimes being asked to solve problems that are ultimately administrative, institutional or political in nature.
A court may order a government agency to act, overturn an unlawful decision or affirm a constitutional right. But where the underlying institution remains dysfunctional, the judgment may have limited effect beyond the individual case.
That gap between judicial pronouncement and institutional behaviour remains one of the major challenges confronting public-interest advocacy in Nigeria.
The lawyer Nigeria will need in 2035
For Professor Aisha Sani Maikudi, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Abuja, the challenge begins much earlier — in the education and preparation of lawyers.
If public-interest law is changing, she argued, legal education must change with it.
The traditional lawyer trained principally to interpret statutes, argue cases and navigate court procedures may not be sufficiently equipped for a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, technology regulation, climate change, public finance and complex policy questions.
The discussion therefore pushed beyond the familiar question of how lawyers should litigate and towards what lawyers need to understand before they enter the courtroom.
A public-interest lawyer dealing with an automated government decision, for example, may need to understand not only constitutional rights but also algorithms, data governance and the allocation of responsibility between government agencies and technology providers.
The same applies to climate and environmental disputes, public procurement, government finance and other areas in which legal rights increasingly intersect with technical and economic questions.
The lawyer of the future, the panel suggested, will need to be more than a specialist in legal rules. The profession will increasingly require lawyers who understand how institutions work and how law can be used to solve problems outside the courtroom.
When public outrage fades, what remains?
The conversation took another turn with actress and activist Hilda Dokubo, who brought the perspective of citizens and social advocacy into a discussion often dominated by legal professionals.
A recurring problem in public-interest campaigns is the distance between the language used by lawyers and the concerns experienced by ordinary people.
An issue can generate enormous public outrage, dominate social media and attract political attention for several days before disappearing from the national conversation without producing lasting reform.
That raises a difficult question for the legal profession: how can public anger be converted into sustained pressure for institutional change?
The challenge is particularly relevant in an era when social media can create extraordinary attention around an injustice almost overnight, but cannot by itself guarantee that the institutions responsible for addressing the problem will change.
For public-interest lawyers, the task may therefore involve building longer-term campaigns around issues that citizens care about, rather than waiting for each controversy to reach the courts before responding.
Can Attorneys-General be guardians of accountability?
The panel also examined the role of government lawyers through the contribution of Dr. Junaidu Marshall, Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice of Kebbi State.
The office of Attorney-General carries a dual responsibility. Its holder serves as the chief legal adviser to government, but also occupies a constitutional position with broader implications for the administration of justice and the protection of the public interest.
That creates difficult choices where political expediency collides with constitutional obligations.
The discussion asked whether Attorneys-General should be expected to do more than defend government decisions in court and instead serve as internal advocates for legality, constitutional compliance and institutional accountability.
It also raised the question of what safeguards can help an Attorney-General resist political pressure when government action conflicts with constitutional requirements.
The issue goes to the heart of public-interest law: accountability cannot depend entirely on citizens taking government to court after a violation has occurred. Government institutions themselves must have mechanisms capable of detecting and correcting unlawful conduct.
Has public-interest litigation changed Nigeria enough?
The most direct challenge came during the panel’s cross-fire, when participants were asked to consider whether decades of public-interest litigation had produced changes in governance proportionate to the number of important cases brought before Nigerian courts.
The answer is not straightforward.
Public-interest litigation has produced important constitutional precedents and provided remedies in cases where individuals might otherwise have had little recourse. It has also expanded legal protections and forced public institutions to account for their actions.
But litigation has limits.
A judgment can declare what the law requires without necessarily changing the culture, capacity or incentives of the institution expected to comply with it.
That led to another practical question: if lawyers were given the power to change only one law, institution, policy or practice to strengthen public accountability in Nigeria, what should they choose?
The question deliberately shifted the conversation from diagnosis to action.
Who decides what is in the public interest?
The panel also confronted a less obvious problem: the meaning of “public interest” itself.
Lawyers, judges, governments, civil-society organisations and citizens may have very different ideas about what serves the public.
A government may describe a policy as being in the national interest while a community affected by that policy considers it harmful. A court may determine the constitutional validity of an action without resolving every social or economic consequence arising from it.
That tension raises an important question about who gets to define the public interest and whose voice should count when competing claims collide.
For lawyers committed to public-interest work, the answer may require closer engagement with the people whose interests they claim to represent.
Beyond the courtroom
The discussion also broadened the scope of public-interest law to issues that are increasingly difficult to separate from constitutional and human-rights questions.
Participants considered whether enforcement of judgments receives enough attention compared with the effort devoted to obtaining them; whether meaningful public-interest litigation can flourish when ordinary citizens cannot afford legal representation; and whether sustainable funding models are needed to support long-term advocacy.
Artificial intelligence presented another emerging frontier.
As governments increasingly adopt automated systems, the possibility of an algorithm making a decision that harms a citizen raises questions about legal responsibility. Should liability rest with the government agency using the system, the developer who created it, the official who deployed it, or some combination of those actors?
Environmental and climate justice also emerged as an area likely to demand greater attention from public-interest lawyers, particularly as environmental disputes increasingly involve constitutional rights, public health, livelihoods and access to natural resources.
The anti-corruption debate received similar scrutiny. The reliance on criminal prosecution as the dominant response to corruption may need to be complemented by stronger systems designed to prevent abuse before it occurs.
The real measure of public-interest law
By the end of the session, the discussion had moved well beyond whether lawyers should file more cases.
The more fundamental issue was whether the profession should judge its public-interest contribution by the number of cases it wins, or by the changes those cases produce.
A successful judgment can change the law. A sustained campaign can change an institution. A functioning institution can change the daily experience of millions of people.
That is the standard the NBA-SPIDEL conversation ultimately placed before the profession.
Public-interest law will continue to need courageous lawyers willing to challenge government action and defend citizens before the courts. But if every failure of governance has to be corrected through litigation, the deeper institutional problem remains unresolved.
The harder and more ambitious task is to build systems in which fewer citizens have to go to court simply to obtain rights that should already be respected.
For Nigeria’s legal profession, that may be the real meaning of going “Beyond Limits”: not abandoning litigation, but ensuring that litigation is only one part of a broader effort to make public institutions work.
The question facing lawyers, therefore, is no longer simply whether they can win the next important case.
It is whether the case, campaign or intervention leaves behind an institution that works better, a government that is more accountable and a citizen whose life is materially different because the law was invoked.
