Opinion: Nigeria Has Too Many Lawyers And Not Enough Law
Every year, in a ceremony of considerable pomp, Nigeria's Body of Benchers calls thousands of new lawyers to the bar.
By Kio Amachree
STOCKHOLM — Every year, in a ceremony of considerable pomp, Nigeria's Body of Benchers calls thousands of new lawyers to the bar. They emerge in black gowns and white horsehair wigs, photographed by proud families, ready to join one of the largest legal professions in Africa. And yet if you ask an ordinary Nigerian where the law can be found — in a land dispute, a police station, an election tribunal — the honest answer is a shrug.
Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of lawyers. It suffers from a shortage of law. The two are not the same thing, and the gap between them opened four decades ago.
In August 1985, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida seized power promising a gentler dictatorship, and released a few political prisoners for the cameras. But he kept his predecessor's Decree 2, which permitted indefinite detention without charge, and used it against critics for the next eight years. Ouster clauses instructed judges that certain matters were none of their concern. The law became a delivery service, carrying whatever the barracks ordered. A generation of lawyers discovered that it was more profitable to serve power than to restrain it, and the profession quietly stopped being a check on government and became its errand boy.
Mr. Babangida's economic legacy was no better. On July 1, 1986, his government adopted a Structural Adjustment Program written to the specifications of the International Monetary Fund. The naira, which had traded at rough parity with the dollar a few years earlier, was devalued by more than half. Inflation reached 40 percent by 1989. The manufacturing base that had grown during the oil years of the early 1980s was hollowed out. In the same period, he quietly enrolled Nigeria, a constitutionally secular country evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, in the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Then there were the deaths. In April 1985, a woman named Gloria Okon was arrested at Kano airport carrying heroin; she died in custody six days later under circumstances that have never been explained. The journalist Dele Giwa, who was reportedly investigating whether the case reached into the presidency, was killed by a parcel bomb in October 1986. When junior officers led by Maj. Gideon Orkar attempted a coup in 1990, their broadcast charged the regime with corruption, drug trafficking and human rights abuses. Nigeria's later reputation as a transit hub for narcotics was born in those years, and it was born under a government that looked the other way.
I have written before that Mr. Babangida was the worst thing to happen to Nigeria until Bola Tinubu came along, and I see no reason to revise that view. What interests me now is not the general but the lawyers who watched him work. Through all of it, the Nigerian bar did what it does best. It adjusted its wig.
Which brings me to the wig.
Before the 1660s, English judges and barristers were required to keep their hair short and their beards trimmed as a mark of discipline. The fashion for wigs arrived with the Restoration court of Charles II, who had spent his exile in France admiring Louis XIV. The French king wore a wig to conceal a scalp gone bald from what historians believe was syphilis. In an age when Europeans held that water opened the pores and let in disease, washing was rare. Hair was filthy and infested with lice; venereal disease made it fall out in clumps. Gentlemen shaved their heads and covered the evidence with horsehair. By the end of the 18th century the fashion had died everywhere except among bishops, coachmen and lawyers.
The wig, in other words, began as a hygiene product and a cover for disease. It was never a symbol of justice. That meaning was assigned to it later, by men who needed one.
England has largely let it go. Its civil and family courts dropped the wig in 2008. In 2025, the Bar of England and Wales relaxed the rule in criminal courts as well, conceding in writing that a headpiece designed in Georgian London was never made for Afros or dreadlocks. Kenya's chief justice, Willy Mutunga, took his oath of office in a business suit in 2011, in the same country where wigged colonial judges once sentenced more than a thousand Mau Mau to death.
In Nigeria, the wig endures. It is compulsory in every superior court. Chief Justice Walter Onnoghen called in 2017 for a review of what he called vestiges of colonialism; the Nigerian Bar Association surveyed its members the same year and never published the result. So Nigerian lawyers, the descendants of Jaja of Opobo and Nana of Itsekiri and the Sultans of Sokoto, continue to sweat under the tropical sun in a dead Englishman's hairpiece and call it dignity. The colonial masters left in 1960. We kept the costume as a souvenir.
It is, when you consider its origins, a joke — a joke that has been elevated into a badge of respectability. The joke is on those who wear it. The only thing missing is the lice.
Clothing is not the disease, of course; it is a symptom. But a profession that still dresses as its colonial masters dressed will tend to think as they thought, and to serve whoever happens to be master today. Nigeria's lawyers spent the Babangida years perfecting the art of deference. They have spent the years since perfecting it further.
If Nigerian law is ever to find its way back, it might begin with a small act of self-respect: take off the wig, take off the gown, and remember what the profession was for.
... Kio Amachree writes the "Letters from Stockholm" series on Nigerian governance and pan-African affairs.
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