By Charles Ude, Esq
A CONGRATULATORY AND WELCOMING MESSAGE
Before I roll up my sleeves and plunge into the substance of this paper, it is fitting, indeed, it would be my great pleasure to pause and offer a resounding salute to Mrs. Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, on her historic election and assumption of office as the 33rd President of the Nigerian Bar Association. She is the first woman ever to be elected to that exalted position in the Association’s history, and only the second woman to lead the Bar since its formation in 1933. Her election, secured with 12,317 votes in a keenly contested three-way race, represents a watershed moment for the legal profession and for gender inclusion in Nigeria.
President Badejo-Okusanya brings to the Bar a distinguished career spanning litigation, arbitration, and public service, including her tenure as General Counsel to the Governor of Lagos State and her elevation to the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria in September 2025. Her campaign slogan, “A Bolder Bar That Works for Everyone” , focused on lawyers’ welfare, institutional accountability, and reducing the cost of legal practice. It is our earnest hope that her presidency will provide the bold, reformist leadership necessary to tackle the crisis in legal education that this paper addresses. We welcome her with enthusiasm and pledge our support for a transformative tenure.
I also record my profound gratitude to the immediate past President, Mazi Afam Josiah Osigwe, SAN, whose convening of the 2026 NBA Legal Education Summit and courageous questioning of the five-year LLB model provided the intellectual foundation for the reforms advocated herein. He planted the seed; we now water it.
INTRODUCTION: A STORM BREWING IN PLAIN SIGHT
There is a quiet storm brewing in Nigeria’s legal education landscape , a tempest that has been gathering force for decades, yet one that many have chosen to ignore. At the 2026 NBA Legal Education Summit, the then President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, stood before his colleagues and asked a question that many have whispered but few have dared to voice: why must a Nigerian law student spend five years earning an LLB degree when their counterparts in England do it in three, and when the quality of graduates emerging from our system continues to raise serious concerns?
The statistics are sobering; indeed, they are enough to make one’s blood run cold. In the December 2025 Bar Final Examination, 1,067 candidates failed out of 7,602 who sat for the exam, representing a pass rate of only 79.1 per cent, a decline from the previous year’s 84 per cent. Even more alarming, in the May 2026 Bar Final resit examination, 983 out of 1,955 candidates failed, a staggering 50.3 percent failure rate, up sharply from 36.3 per cent in the 2025 resit. These are not just numbers on a page. These are thousands of young Nigerians who have spent five years in university, incurred significant financial burdens that would make a banker weep, and watched their dreams of joining the legal profession slip through their fingers like sand through an hourglass.
This paper argues that reducing the LLB programme from five to three years, accompanied by a focused, practical curriculum, is not merely desirable, it is urgently necessary. The clock is ticking, and we cannot afford to dither.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE CURRENT FIVE-YEAR MODEL: AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
The five-year LLB programme in Nigeria was not designed by accident, but it has certainly outlived its purpose, like a horse and buggy in the age of automobiles. The current structure forces students to spend an excessive amount of time on theoretical instruction that often duplicates what is later taught at the Nigerian Law School. As the then NBA President astutely observed, “keeping a person in a law faculty for five years will not improve the quality of legal education” and “some of the courses offered in universities are, in reality, subsumed under some courses that are of practical relevance to legal practice.” In other words, we are asking students to climb the same mountain twice.
What do we find when we look at the evidence? The high failure rates at the Bar finals tell a story that is difficult to ignore, indeed, it screams at us. The December 2025 results showed that while 212 candidates earned first-class honours, a mere 2.7 per cent of the total—a significant number of candidates, 1,622 (21.3%), could only manage a Pass grade, while 314 (4.1%) received Conditional Pass grades. These are graduates who have already spent five years studying law at the university level. If five years of university legal education cannot adequately prepare a student for the Bar finals, then something is fundamentally wrong with the content and delivery of that education, not merely its duration. The rot runs deeper than the skin.
The crisis is compounded by the accreditation scandal in Nigerian law faculties, a can of worms that has been opened wide. In 2024, the Council of Legal Education suspended admissions into the law faculties of nine universities that had willfully admitted and graduated students before obtaining accreditation. As of recent reports, only the University of Lagos enjoyed full accreditation status, while dozens of others operated on provisional, interim, or suspended accreditation. Yet the number of approved law faculties has ballooned from four in the early 1960s to approximately 122 in 2026. This proliferation, without corresponding quality assurance, has degraded standards across the board. We are suffering from a crisis of quantity over quality.
Chidi Anselm Odinkalu has raised valid concerns about comparing Nigeria’s five-year LLB with the UK’s three-year programme, arguing that the quality of pre-university education differs significantly between the two countries. This is a point well taken, but it is precisely why reform must go beyond merely shortening the duration. A three-year LLB in Nigeria must be accompanied by a radical overhaul of curriculum content, teaching methods, and entry standards. The goal is not simply to reduce years but to improve quality through focus and relevance. We must kill two birds with one stone.
GLOBAL PRACTICES: WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES
When we look beyond our shores, the argument for a three-year LLB becomes even more compelling like a beacon in the fog.
The United Kingdom, the very jurisdiction from which Nigeria inherited its common law tradition—offers a three-year LLB programme for undergraduate students. This is followed by professional training (the SQE or BPTC) that prepares graduates for practice. The total timeline to qualification is significantly shorter than Nigeria’s current model, yet the UK produces some of the world’s most respected lawyers. They have cracked the code.
The then NBA President rightly drew attention to the University of Buckingham in England, which offers a two-year LLB programme. Remarkably, Nigerian students have for years taken advantage of this accelerated programme, graduating in two years and returning home to qualify at the Nigerian Law School. If a Buckingham LLB graduate can successfully navigate the Nigerian Law School after only two years of university legal education, what justification remains for insisting that Nigerian students spend five? The answer is simple: none.
Australia offers a three to four-year LLB programme, with graduates proceeding to practical legal training (PLT) before admission. South Africa, another common law jurisdiction with similar developmental challenges, has its undergraduate LLB under review precisely because of poor outcomes: only 20% of entrants complete the programme within four years, and only about 50% of graduates enter the legal profession at all. Some South African universities have already discontinued the undergraduate LLB, while others require students to first register in Arts, Commerce, or Science before being screened for law admission in the second year. They are not afraid to change course when the ship is sinking.
Canada and the United States take a different approach—law is studied at the graduate level, requiring a prior undergraduate degree followed by three years of law school, totalling approximately seven years of higher education. This model is longer but serves a different educational philosophy. Nigeria, however, follows the UK model of direct-entry undergraduate legal education and, if we are to follow that model, we should follow it consistently, including its shorter duration. We cannot have our cake and eat it too.
What these comparisons reveal is that Nigeria’s five-year LLB is an outlier, a sore thumb sticking out. We are requiring our students to spend two additional years in university compared to their UK counterparts, without any demonstrable improvement in outcomes, as the Bar finals failure rates painfully demonstrate.
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