Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan and her Lawyers are Guilty of Contributory Negligence for the Delay in her Resumption, If She and Her Lawyers had Applied Legisprudence and Parliamentary Diplomacy: Litigation is not the Best (Or Only) Solution (Lessons From Femi Falana SAN)

By Dr. Tonye Clinton Jaja

THISDAY newspaper is one of Nigeria’s largest-selling national daily newspapers. It was established in the year 1994.

I feel honoured to be invited by the Law Column of THISDAY newspaper to provide a written opinion on this issue of whether or not Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan ought to resume after serving her six-month suspension.

My straightforward answer is that Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan and her lawyers are the architects of the delay in her resumption.

In other words, apart from any blame that can be heaped upon the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, both Senator Natasha and her lawyers share a measure of blame.

In legal parlance, it is referred to as “contributory negligence”.

For example, yesterday being 11th September 2025, one of her lawyers (J. Numa, SAN) wrote a letter addressed to the Clerk To The National Assembly.

His letter was supposed to be a response to the letter dated 4th September 2025 and signed by the Acting Clerk To The National Assembly, Dr. Yahaya Dan-Zaria, Esq. wherein the said Acting Clerk had stated reasons why Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan could not resume immediately.

Both the tone and the content of the said letter betrays a lack of understanding of legisprudence, parliamentary diplomacy, display of simple good faith and professional courtesy that is prescribed by Rule 26 of the Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners, 2023.

The Acting Clerk to the National Assembly (Dr. Yahaya Dan-Zaria, Esq.) that signed the said letter dated 4th September 2025, is a very senior lawyer that was called to the Nigerian Bar even before the said J. Numa, SAN.

Amongst Nigerian lawyers, there is a culture of respect for seniors.

Paul Babatunde Daudu, SAN is one of the Nigerian lawyers that displays utmost respect for seniority at the Bar.

Even though he is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and a lawyer for the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, against whom my professional Association has filed two lawsuits, he took the initiative to phone me and respectfully made his submissions.

We have maintained a mutually respectfully professional relationship even though we still hold on to different positions on the on-going issues involving the resumption of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan.

In fact, I was deeply appreciative of his humility when he admitted that legislative law is not his area of core expertise in law and he humbly requested for legal materials and resources which I sent across to him electronically.

One would have expected that J. Numa, SAN to have arranged a meeting with the Acting Clerk to the National Assembly, Dr. Yahaya Dan-Zaria, Esq. as the person that signed the said letter dated 4th September 2025.

The purpose of such a meeting would be for the lawyer to Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan to gain insights into the remote, underlying reasons behind the said letter. Most of these reasons are usually not captured inside contains of formal letters.

And the benefits of such face-to-face meetings are priceless because they provide invaluable ammunition with which any litigation lawyer can utilise later in court.

In fact, the litigation lawyer can cite such pre-litigation meetings to win the sympathy of the judge later on, as as evidence that he explored and exhausted amicable methods of resolution before embarking upon litigation as a last resort.

Such pre-litigation meeting is also important when any lawyer is dealing with an area of legal practice that the said litigation lawyer is not familiar with.

Legislative law or the law that deals with legislation, legislators and legislatures is a still a new and emerging area of legal practice considering that it was only in the year 1999 that legislatures were allowed to operate after decades of military rule in Nigeria.

Dr. Yahaya Dan-Zaria, Esq. (currently the Clerk to the House of Representatives, National Assembly) who has been a staff of the National Assembly since the year 1994, can be regarded as an authority on legislative law.

This is because he has garnered years of experience as a legislative lawyer through a combination of practical hands-on experience in dealing with legislators and attendance of training in legislative drafting in the United States of America (USA) and other foreign jurisdictions.

J. Numa, SAN, lawyer for Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan missed a golden opportunity to learn about legisprudence (the art and science of legislative law) and parliamentary diplomacy from one of the living legends of Nigerian jurisprudence.

From personal experience, I myself have drawn from the wealth of experience of Dr. Yahaya Dan-Zaria within the eleven (11) years that I worked as a staff of the National Assembly’s Institute for Legislative Studies from 2013 to 2024.

For example, even before his appointment as Clerk to the House of Representatives, National Assembly, Dr. Yahaya Dan-Zaria, Esq. gave me invaluable legal advice not to use litigation as a method to collect a debt of over ₦10,000,000 that I was owed by the leadership of the 9th House of Representatives for the law books that they commissioned me to write and supply.

That advise proved invaluable because it ensured that I have maintained a cordial working relationship with the leadership of the 10th House of Representatives.

The cordial working relationship with the leadership of the 10th House of Representatives has paid in more ways than I can enumerate. Provision of continuing professional development (CPD) training on legislative drafting for staff and other legal services that lawyer-client privilege would not allow to write about.

To conclude, since the year 2015, I came under the part-time pupillage of Femi Falana SAN and I have learned that a successful lawyer does not apply litigation as the be-all-and-end-all tool of his or her trade or profession.

Femi Falana SAN has won many highly complicated cases without filing a single pre-litigation letter or brief of argument inside any court of law.

Even though Femi Falana SAN does not hold a Master of Laws (LLM) degree in legislative drafting, he was able to engage the leadership of the 9th National Assembly to secure the amendment of a piece of legislation that helped the then Nigerian government to recoup over $62,000,000 in unpaid royalties by international oil companies operating within Nigeria.

He achieved this by holding pre-litigation meetings with the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, National Assembly and Senator Theodore Kalu.

I was involved as the legislative drafting lawyer who drafted the Bill for the amendment of the Deep Offshore Production Sharing Contract Act, 2000.

I have said enough. On this note, I rest my case.

Yours faithfully,
Dr. Tonye Clinton Jaja,
12th September 2025.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.