As Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, settles into the presidency of the Nigerian Bar Association, a fresh demand is emerging from within the profession: that the new administration should make medical and health law a more visible part of the Bar’s public-interest agenda.
The call came in a congratulatory message to the NBA’s 33rd president from Joyce N. Eseni, Esq., 2nd Vice Chair of the NBA Section on Legal Practice’s Medicine & Law Committee, who urged Badejo-Okusanya to use her tenure to strengthen the legal profession’s response to some of the country’s most difficult healthcare disputes.
For Eseni, the opportunity goes beyond creating another specialist interest within the Bar. She pointed to a widening field in which lawyers increasingly have to confront questions of patients’ rights, medical negligence, professional accountability and access to healthcare.
Her message came shortly after Badejo-Okusanya formally assumed office in Port Harcourt, completing a remarkable passage to the leadership of Nigeria’s foremost professional association of lawyers. She is the NBA’s first woman to win the presidency through a direct election and only the second woman to lead the association, following Dame Priscilla Kuye’s tenure in 1991–92.
The significance of the moment has already been cast in broader terms by the new president herself. At her inauguration, Badejo-Okusanya said she did not seek the office simply to make history but to make a difference, while pledging to lead a Bar in which there would be “no victims and no vanquished”. She has also placed members’ welfare, technology and institutional reform among the priorities of her administration.
The Medicine & Law Committee’s intervention adds another question to that agenda: How should the legal profession respond when failures in the health system become failures of rights, accountability and justice?
The law beyond the courtroom
Nigeria’s healthcare system generates legal questions at almost every level, from informed consent and confidentiality to medical negligence, professional discipline, compensation for injured patients and the regulation of emerging medical technologies.
Yet medical law remains a relatively specialised field of practice, often becoming prominent only after a patient has suffered serious injury or a dispute has reached the courts.
Eseni’s appeal suggests a different approach: Greater medico-legal awareness among lawyers before disputes become crises.
That could mean stronger continuing legal education on medical negligence and patients’ rights, closer engagement between the NBA and medical professional bodies, and more sustained advocacy around laws and regulations governing healthcare delivery.
It could also place the Bar in a stronger position to interrogate a difficult question that sits at the intersection of law and public policy: What legal protection does a Nigerian patient actually have when the healthcare system fails?
From negligence to access
The scope of the proposed agenda is wider than medical negligence.
Patients’ rights increasingly intersect with questions of access, affordability, professional standards, hospital accountability and the regulation of private healthcare providers. For vulnerable patients, the ability to enforce a right can be as important as the existence of the right itself.
A more assertive health-law agenda could therefore bring together lawyers working in constitutional law, human rights, public interest litigation, commercial regulation and professional discipline.
It could also provide the NBA with another avenue for public-interest advocacy at a time when the association is seeking to define the role of the profession beyond routine courtroom practice.
Badejo-Okusanya’s election itself followed a turbulent electoral season marked by disputes over the NBA’s electronic voting system, voter participation and the credibility of the process. She emerged with 12,317 votes, representing 47.18 per cent of the votes cast, defeating Lateef Akangbe, SAN, and Olumuyiwa Akinboro, SAN.
Her inauguration has now shifted the focus from how she won to what she will do with the mandate.
A test for the new administration
The Medicine & Law Committee’s appeal could therefore become part of a larger conversation about the priorities of the new Bar leadership.
Badejo-Okusanya has inherited an association facing familiar questions about the economic welfare of young lawyers, professional standards, access to justice and the credibility of its institutions. Her administration has already signalled plans to pursue better remuneration for lawyers, improve access to legal resources and modernise the NBA Secretariat through technology.
Health law would add a distinctly public-facing dimension to that programme.
For a profession that routinely represents patients, doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurers and government institutions, the field offers the NBA an opportunity to influence policy before disputes reach the courtroom.
It is also an area in which the consequences of legal failure can be unusually immediate: a delayed case may affect property or commercial interests, but a failure of accountability in healthcare can affect a person’s health, livelihood or life.
That is why Eseni’s appeal is significant. It asks the new NBA leadership to treat medicine and law not as two separate professional worlds but as disciplines that increasingly meet at the point where individual rights, professional responsibility and public policy collide.
For Badejo-Okusanya, who has taken office promising a members-first administration, the challenge may be whether that promise can be extended beyond the immediate concerns of lawyers to the millions of Nigerians whose encounters with the legal system begin in hospitals, clinics and other healthcare settings.
The new president has been handed the history-making title. The harder task now is deciding what that history will mean.
