By Eyimofe Atake, SAN
I have read the Certified True Copy (CTC) of a judgment that settles, with finality, a question that has divided our profession for over a decade, and in settling it opens a gap that only the National Assembly can now close. The case is Ben Mene-Ejegi Esq v Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) & Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC), SC/481/2018, delivered on 26 June 2026 by a full court of seven, judgment delivered by Mohammed Baba Idris JSC. The judgment itself records that it was prompted by the debate which followed Osuji v LPDC (2025) 17 NWLR (Pt. 2014) 317, a debate the Court acknowledges engaged the NBA, the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria and the Body of Benchers. To understand what the Court has done, one must first understand the confusion it has ended.
One Act, several printings.
There has only ever been one Legal Practitioners Act (LPA), but at different times the statute book has carried different versions of it, and the versions disagreed on a single question: where does a lawyer appeal when the LPDC sanctions him? As the history was traced without contradiction before the Court, the original 1962 Act sent appeals straight to the Supreme Court. The 1975 Act, which re-enacted it, inserted a middle step: the sanctioned lawyer appealed first to an Appeal Committee of the Body of Benchers, and from there to the Supreme Court. Then came the third version: the Legal Practitioners (Amendment) Decree No. 21 of 1994 rebuilt the LPDC as a committee of the Body of Benchers, abolished the Appeal Committee outright, and wrote the words “Supreme Court” into what became section 12(7), restoring the short ladder: LPDC straight to the Supreme Court.
Then came the blunder. The compilers of the Laws of the Federation of Nigeria (LFN) 2004 reproduced the old 1975 version and left the 1994 amendment out by mistake, resurrecting on paper an Appeal Committee the law had abolished ten years earlier. From that moment two versions of one Act sat side by side. In 2014 the then Attorney General of the Federation, Mohammed Bello Adoke SAN, corrected the record: he directed the Federal Government Printer, under section 22(1) of the Interpretation Act, to reprint the Act as a supplement to the LFN 2004 incorporating the 1994 Decree, his foreword recording that the Decree had never been repealed but was inadvertently omitted. Note the roles carefully: the legislature made the amendment in 1994; the compilers shelved the wrong version in 2004; the Attorney General reshelved the right one in 2014. He corrected the record; he did not, and could not, change the law.
Two schools of thought, each with the Supreme Court behind it.
The courts split along the two versions. One stream followed the Act as amended and heard direct appeals: Okike v LPDC (No. 1) (2005) 3 to 4 SC 49; Nwalutu v NBA (2019) LPELR-46916(SC); (2019) 8 NWLR (Pt. 1673) 174; Kalejaiye v LPDC (2019) 8 NWLR (Pt. 1674) 365; and Gbenoba v LPDC (2021) LPELR-53064(SC).
Another stream followed the 2004 volumes and struck direct appeals out, insisting they go through the Appeal Committee: Aladejobi v NBA (2013) 15 NWLR (Pt. 1376) 66; Akintokun v LPDC (2014) 13 NWLR (Pt. 1423) 1; and Osuji v LPDC (2025) 17 NWLR (Pt. 2014) 317. The cruelty of the second stream was that it sent lawyers to a committee which, under the Act as amended, no longer existed, and which was in any event never constituted. Both schools of thought in the profession held judgments of the Supreme Court in their hands. Both were entitled to their confidence.
What Mene-Ejegi decided.
Faced with a 2018 direct appeal against a striking off, the Court, by a letter of 8 April 2026, invited all counsel to address one question: does the Supreme Court have jurisdiction to hear an appeal from a direction of the LPDC? All three counsel, for the appellant, the NBA and the LPDC alike, argued that it does. The Court disagreed with all of them, and its reasoning did two things in an order that matters.
First, it settled the battle of the versions: the Court proceeded on the Act as amended by the Legal Practitioners (Amendment) Decree No. 21 of 1994, the version reprinted into the statute book on the direction of Attorney General Adoke SAN in 2014, as the true Act, with the LPDC sitting under section 11 as a standing committee of the Body of Benchers and section 12(7) as its appeal provision.
Secondly, having accepted that version, the Court struck its appeal provision down (section 12(7)). The Supreme Court is created by the Constitution and can exercise only the jurisdiction the Constitution gives it. Section 233 gives it appeals from one source alone, the Court of Appeal. Section 232(2) lets the National Assembly enlarge the Court’s original jurisdiction, but no provision lets anyone enlarge its appellate jurisdiction. Section 240, by contrast, expressly lets the National Assembly send appeals from tribunals to the Court of Appeal. That difference, the Court held, is deliberate: what the Constitution allowed for the Court of Appeal, it withheld from the Supreme Court. Accordingly, section 12(7) of the LPA is inconsistent with sections 233 and 240 and is void to that extent by virtue of section 1(3); Okike v LPDC (No. 1) (2005) 3 to 4 SC 49, which had upheld the direct appeal, is overruled to that extent; the only constitutionally recognised route by which any appeal reaches the Supreme Court is through the Court of Appeal; and the appeal was struck out for want of jurisdiction. The Court also observed that the former requirement that a party flag an invitation to depart from precedent, Order 6 Rule 5(4) of the erstwhile Rules culminating in the Supreme Court Rules 2014, has no equivalent in the Supreme Court Rules 2024: the power to depart inheres in the Court itself as the final judicial authority and awaits no invitation.
What stands, what is void, what does not revive.
The Act as amended stands: the LPDC, its composition, its power to try and sanction practitioners, the whole disciplinary machinery, remains good law. Section 12(7), the appeal to the Supreme Court, is void. And the old Appeal Committee does not revive: it was repealed in 1994, the Court has proceeded on the Act as amended, which repealed it, and even if it returned, its own final rung to the Supreme Court would fall to exactly the same constitutional objection. Each school of thought is thus vindicated in part and overtaken in whole: those who stood on the Act as amended were right about the statute book but have lost the destination it named; those who insisted the direct appeal was incompetent were right about the outcome but have lost the route they prescribed.
The gap, which is now the whole story.
Look at what is left. The direct road to the Supreme Court is void. The committee road was repealed in 1994. The road the Court points to, through the Court of Appeal, does not yet exist, because section 240 requires an Act of the National Assembly to prescribe appeals from tribunals to the Court of Appeal, and no Act presently prescribes an appeal from the LPDC to that Court. The plain result: as of 26 June 2026, a legal practitioner struck off the roll has no statutory right of appeal to anybody, anywhere. The profession that administers the disciplinary systems of others has left its own members with none.
The cure is a single clause. The National Assembly should amend the LPA to provide that an appeal from a direction of the LPDC lies to the Court of Appeal. Section 240 expressly invites exactly that clause. From the Court of Appeal, section 233 carries the matter to the Supreme Court in the ordinary way. One clause repairs the whole structure, reconciles the two versions we have argued over for a decade, and gives the sanctioned practitioner what the Constitution promises everyone else: a hearing and an appeal. The NBA, the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria and the Body of Benchers, the very bodies whose debate the Court acknowledged, should jointly sponsor it without delay.
Until that is done.
A practitioner facing the LPDC it would seem at first sight must fight the whole case there, for there is presently no appellate safety net. What remains is the supervisory jurisdiction of the courts over the legality of the proceedings, composition and fair hearing above all, as LPDC v Fawehinmi (1985) 2 NWLR (Pt. 7) 300 established; and the Act’s separate provision allowing a person struck off or suspended to apply for restoration. Any direct appeal now pending at the Supreme Court faces the fate of Mene-Ejegi. The pen now lies with the National Assembly, and the profession should place it in their hands this session.
Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD(Cantab)
