As the debate moves from lawyers’ groups to the national press, Eyimofe Atake, SAN, says the critics have produced plenty of argument but no statutory provision that the memorandum violates.
The Guardian of today, 11 August 2026, has entered our debate with a full feature on the Supreme Court’s memorandum, and the link is already circulating through our groups. I am quoted in it, and quoted accurately, for which I thank the reporter; the piece fairly presents both schools of thought. Since it is already in circulation, let these observations travel with it.
First, the opposing school decides the case against itself. Mr Douglas Ogbankwa argues that a statutory status cannot be altered by a memorandum, yet in the same breath accepts that a restriction confined to practice before the Supreme Court, issued as a practice direction, would be proper. But that is precisely what the memorandum is: an internal instruction confined to the Court’s official correspondence, records and engagements. Once that competence is conceded, the quarrel shrinks to the caption at the top of the page, and no lawyer’s rights turn on whether a page is headed memorandum or practice direction. The objection is to the stationery, not the substance.
And because the claim of conflict with statute keeps recurring, I have taken it seriously in the only way our profession knows how: I went through the laws, provision by provision, looking for the conflicting section. It does not exist. Section 2(1) of the Legal Practitioners Act entitles a person to practise as a barrister and solicitor if his name is on the roll; that entitlement is untouched, and every lawyer in Nigeria still practises before the Supreme Court in both capacities today. Section 4 provides for the call to the Bar; nobody’s call is affected. Section 5 creates the only rank the Act knows, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, worn after the name; untouched. Section 22 protects the description of legal practitioner against impostors; irrelevant to the qualified. Section 24 defines a legal practitioner by his entitlement to practise. Not one word, in the entire Act, about how a name is to be styled in correspondence. A conflict requires two laws, and the critics have so far produced only one document, which is the memorandum itself.
The Constitution fares no better for them, and in truth it testifies for the memorandum. Section 36 avails nobody, for the memorandum creates no offence. Sections 1(1) and 1(3) require an inconsistency, and in a month of debate no critic has named one. But section 236 provides that, subject to any Act of the National Assembly, the Chief Justice of Nigeria may make rules for regulating the practice and procedure of the Supreme Court. And here is the detail everyone has missed: on 1 July 2026, twelve days before the barrister memorandum, the same Chief Justice issued the Supreme Court Practice Directions 2026 on the mandatory electronic upload of processes, expressly pursuant to section 236, and the profession complied without a murmur. If she may prescribe how every process reaches the Court, she may certainly prescribe that names in the Court’s own records appear without an invented prefix. The greater power contains the lesser. For completeness: the Rules of Professional Conduct 2023 are silent on the prefix, and the tribunal that enforces them condemned it; the Legal Education Act concerns the qualifying certificate and says nothing of styles; and there is no Body of Benchers Act at all, the Body being created by section 3 of the Legal Practitioners Act. So I issue a standing invitation: let anyone who maintains that the memorandum conflicts with any law quote the provision. Chapter, section, subsection, and the words. Not the atmosphere of a statute, but its text.
Secondly, the feature introduces one genuinely new authority, and it deserves careful handling, for some will surely brandish it as an answer to the directive. Professor Osaretin Izevbuwa cites Ishaku & Anor v. Kantiok & Ors (2011) LPELR 8944 (CA), also reported in (2012) 7 NWLR (Pt. 1300) 457, where the Court of Appeal, as reported, held that the prefix Barrister attached to a candidate’s name did not invalidate his standing, being an adjectival description and not part of the name. That decision answers a different question from ours. Ishaku is about validity: the prefix does not void a process. Ofomata is about propriety: the prefix is unprofessional and improper. A thing can be improper without being void, and the memorandum concerns neither validity nor voidness but the propriety of official records. Better still, look at what Ishaku actually decided: that Barrister is not part of anyone’s name but an adjectival word describing the person’s profession.
That is the very proposition at the heart of my article, stated by the Court of Appeal itself: Barrister is a description of a lawyer’s professional status; it is not his name and it is not a title. And once that premise is established, the conclusion follows of its own weight. A word that is no part of the name cannot properly stand in front of the name in a register of names, and a word that merely describes a profession belongs where descriptions have always belonged, after the name, in the manner of Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria. So the case offered in defence of the prefix in fact proves the opposite: it establishes the premise, that the word only describes, from which the memorandum’s conclusion, that the word cannot serve as a title before a name, inevitably follows. Far from answering the directive, Ishaku supplies its foundation. And it carries one comfort for the anxious: no past filing bearing Barr. is void on that account. Correction without carnage. Those minded to deploy the case should read the report at (2012) 7 NWLR (Pt. 1300) 457 for themselves.
Thirdly, two small corrections so the record stays clean. Nigerian Bar Association v. Ofomata (2017) 5 NWLR (Pt. 1557) 128 at 133 is a direction of the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee, the profession’s statutory tribunal, not the pronouncement of an appellate court, and its provenance should always be stated exactly. And the feature closes by wondering whether sanctions for non compliance will suffice: there are no sanctions to suffice, for the memorandum prescribes none; its enforcement is the ordinary supervision of a court over its own registry. As for the headline’s promise of constitutional drama, the Constitution was indeed invited to the party, and when it arrived, it took the memorandum’s side.
So where does the Guardian leave us? Exactly where the article stood. The word barrister is innocent. Its position before a name is wrong. The record must be true. The status endures after the name; the prefix remains homeless before it. The debate has now been tested in the national press as it was tested in our groups, and the fence is still standing.
Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)
Lagos, 11 August 2026
