By Sylvester Udemezue
At the recently held 2025 edition of the JASAN Foundation’s Legacy Dialogue 2.0 in Abuja, senior jurists and legal scholars raised alarm over the decline in legal education, ethics, intellectual depth, and mentorship within Nigeria’s legal profession. His Lordship, the Honorable Justice Emmanuel Agim of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, decried the waning reading culture among lawyers, linking ignorance of the law to unethical and corrupt practices within both the Bar and the Bench. He criticised lawyers who, despite holding court judgments in their hands, fail to read or understand them, yet confidently express misguided opinions in public. According to him, true integrity in legal practice stems from knowledge and conscience, not mere appearance. Justice Agim lamented that many modern lawyers now prioritise winning cases at all costs over the pursuit of justice, reflecting a broader moral decay within the profession.
The event (JASAN Foundation’s Legacy Dialogue 2.0, 2025) underscored an urgent need to revive legal education and restore a robust reading culture as the foundation for ethical and intellectual renewal. However, with profound respect, I believe that before the judiciary can credibly lecture the legal education system or lawyers, the judiciary must first confront the rot within its own house. True reform demands honest self-assessment. As Scripture wisely cautions: “First remove the log from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Reform begins at home; credibility in critique comes only when one’s own house is in order.
THE JUDICIARY’S DEEPENING CRISIS
The judiciary is widely regarded as the soul of every democracy. Yet, in Nigeria, it has become the weakest link in the chain of governance. Across the country, courtrooms overflow with cases, judgments are delayed for donkey years or even decades, and public confidence in judicial integrity continues to erode. Courtrooms are overcrowded, registries ineffective, archaic and underfunded, and procedural inefficiencies rampant. Appointments to the Bench are increasingly perceived as influenced by connections rather than competence, and elevations often appear guided more by internal politics than by merit or integrity. When the courts of the land (institutions expected to embody integrity, fairness, and consistency) become entangled in internal controversies, chronic delays, contradictory decisions, and opaque procedures, they lose the moral authority to prescribe reform elsewhere. Before the Nigerian Bench can critique the Bar or the law school or other legal education institutions, the Judiciary must pause and ask itself sobering questions:
- Are our judgments consistent, reasoned, and delivered without undue delay?
- Are judicial appointments transparent, merit-based, and ethically sound?
- Are the ethical standards of the Bench truly beyond reproach?
- Has the administration of justice in Nigeria not become needlessly slow and cumbersome?
- Are the judicial processes in Nigeria insulated from political manipulation or external influence?
- What concrete, pragmatic steps are being taken to confront and correct these systemic challenges in the Nigerian justice delivery sector?
If clear answers to these pertinent questions remain elusive, then the log still lies within the judiciary’s own eye. So, with due respect, my Lord, the Hon Justice Agim should go back and first get his own constituency (the judiciary) to put its own house in order before he (my Lord) can come to try to lecture other sectors on effectiveness and pragmatic reforms.
JUSTICE DELAYED, JUSTICE DESTROYED : A SYSTEMIC DECAY IN THE NIGERIAN JUDICIARY
Recent realities reinforce the gravity of Nigeria’s judicial crisis. On 28 October 2025, a public-interest lawyer highlighted cases exposing systemic inefficiency: (I) A year-2000 appeal was struck out by the Supreme Court on grounds of incompetence because the appellant failed to obtain leave to appeal. If leave had been granted, the appeal (already 25 years old) would have been the oldest in Nigeria’s legal history. (II). In Pillars v. Desbordes (2021), Justice Agim himself noted that the appeal before the Supreme Court, arising from a Lagos High Court decision delivered in December 2000, had been pending since 2009: a judicial delay spanning over 28 years; (III). Chief Emeka Obegolu, SAN, had earlier recounted that an appeal filed in 2005 came up for hearing in 2022 only for the Court to discover that both parties had died; the matter was then adjourned to 2024 for substitution.
These examples are not anomalies but symptomatic of a chronic malaise: a judiciary where justice moves at the speed of exhaustion, where litigants die waiting, and where “justice delayed is justice denied” often becomes “justice destroyed.”
ARE NIGERIAN COURTS STILL THE “TEMPLES OF JUSTICE”?
In my earlier essay, “Are Nigerian Courts Still the Temples of Justice, the Last Hope of the Common Man?”, I had argued that the judiciary (once hailed as the temple of justice) is now increasingly perceived as the last refuge of the elite. Many ordinary Nigerians no longer view courts as sanctuaries of fairness but as marketplaces where justice is slow, uncertain, and sometimes for sale. This unequal tempo breeds cynicism and erodes the rule of law. High-profile political cases are fast-tracked, while ordinary citizens’ matters languish in courts across the land for decades. When justice becomes selective, the judiciary ceases to be the last hope of the common man. Citizens lose faith, increasingly turning to self-help, vigilantism, or despair: a threat to democracy itself.
NIGERIA’S YOUNG LAWYERS LEARN FROM WHAT THEY SEE IN THE NIGERIAN JUDICIARY
When judges lament the declining quality of advocacy or scholarship among young lawyers, they overlook a crucial truth: learning is both taught and observed; law students and young practitioners are shaped not only by their professors but by the conduct of the Bench and Bar. If they witness conflicting judgments on similar facts, needless and endless adjournments in the courts, and selective application of ethics, the message is clear. When proximity to power rewards mediocrity rather than merit, the values transmitted are distorted. A broken judiciary produces a compromised Bar, regardless of classroom instruction. These is the reality my lord, the Hon Justice Agim ignored!
LEGAL EDUCATION HAS ITS FLAWS: BUT THEY PALE IN COMPARISON TO THE ROT IN NIGERIA’S JUDICIARY
There is no denying that Nigeria’s legal education system requires re-engineering. Curriculum gaps, inadequate exposure to technology, underfunding, overcrowded classrooms, widespread incompetence among some administrators, insufficient practical training, among many other challenges, are genuine concerns. Yet, these challenges are secondary to the structural decay of the judiciary. Law students and young lawyers learn primarily by observing the practice of law. If they witness inefficiency, corruption, and delays at the highest judicial levels, no classroom reform can produce ethical and courageous lawyers. The best teachers of justice are not merely professors but judges in the courtroom. When these judges fail to act with consistency, diligence, efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity, the rot seeps into every layer of legal education.
REFORM MUST BEGIN FROM WITHIN
A judiciary that cannot guarantee predictability, accountability, transparency, or timeliness cannot inspire the confidence necessary for national stability or investment. Reform cannot be achieved through rhetoric or finger-pointing; it demands institutional accountability and action: (a). Modernise courtrooms and administrative processes; (b). Ensure judicial appointments are transparent and merit-driven; (c). Deliver consistent, reasoned judgments and promptly too; (d). Enforce discipline without fear or favour; (e). Improve judges’ welfare to reduce vulnerability to compromise (this has been taken care of to a large extent; in 2024, salaries and allowances of judicial officers in Nigeria suffered a 300-percent increase which was implemented instantly).
The bottomline is that until the Nigerian judiciary leads by example, efforts to reform legal education and the wider legal profession will remain aspirational rather than operational.
THE BENCH, THE BAR, AND THE BURDEN OF RESPONSIBILITY
Both the Bar and the Bench share responsibility for the mess that the legal profession has become in Nigeria. The Nigerian Bar Association must move beyond rhetoric and reclaim its watchdog role, demanding transparency, accountability, and ethical revival at all levels. For the Bench, leadership by example is paramount. Judges and judiciary leaders must rebuild public trust, diligence, integrity, consistency, fairness, and initiate and enforce pragmatic reforms to measure up to prevailing global benchmarks. As the saying goes, “The fish rots from the head.” If the judiciary (the head of the justice delivery system) remains weak, indolent, inefficient, ineffective or compromised, no amount of reform at the lower levels will suffice.
A CALL FOR HONEST INTROSPECTION
The judiciary cannot continue to externalize its failures. True, pragmatic reform demands collective humility and institutional courage. Law schools, Law Faculties, Lecturers, and Lawyers must indeed improve, but the judiciary must first cleanse itself. The courts must model transparency, impartiality, diligence, pragmatism, learning, and promptness. Only then will judges’ critiques of legal education and lawyers carry moral weight.
CONCLUSION:
Legal education in Nigeria has its flaws, no doubt, but these pale in comparison to the deep-rooted decay within the judicial system. The problem is not merely that lawyers know too little, it is that the system they serve has grown too tolerant of inefficiency, inconsistency, indolence and corruption. Until the judiciary removes the log in its own eye (through transparency, accountability, efficiency, and integrity), its lectures on reform will continue to ring hollow. Reform must begin from within. Only a judiciary that embodies these principles can once again become the temple of justice: the true last hope of the common man.
Respectfully,
Sylvester Udemezue (udems), Legal Practitioner, Law Teacher, public-Interest Advocate, and Proctor of The Reality Ministry of Truth Law and Justice (TRM).
08021365545 [email protected].
www.therealityministry.ngo.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
