Deputy Director-General and Head of Lagos Campus of the Nigerian Law School, Mrs Toun Adebiyi, has said abolition of the school, which provides legal education to legal practitioners in Nigeria, will mean disaster.
Adebiyi said this last week at an event marking the 50th Anniversary of the Nigerian Law School.
She said this amid calls by stakeholders, including former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Chief Wole Olanipekun (SAN), for collaboration with government in funding the law school.
Each of the six campuses of the Nigerian Law School is to mark the anniversary locally before the grand finale in Abuja on November 27. The other campuses are in Abuja, Enugu, Kano, Yenagoa and Yola.
Before the establishment of the law school, which came three years after Nigeria’s Independence in October 1960, legal practitioners in the country were receiving the requisite legal education in England and were being called to the English Bar.
Adebiyi, while fielding questions from journalists after the event which held on the Lagos campus, said the call for the scrapping of the Nigerian Law School could not be justified in view of poor quality of graduates being produced in some universities in the country.
She also said the desired result would not be achieved with the abolition of the law school, as various faculties of law in Nigeria’s universities were not being able to complete their curricula within time.
She added that the universities would not likely fare better if additional responsibilities were given to them.
She said, “I don’t subscribe to the call that the law school be scrapped because a lot of these universities that want to incorporate law school programme into theirs do not cover most of the parts of the curriculum they are supposed to cover.
“If you now leave the training of lawyers from the start to finish to them , I’ll tell you, this will be a disaster in this country.”
She corroborated her stand with an instance of a law school student who could not correctly spell ‘lawyer’.
She said, “I’ll give you an example of what happened last year when we were examining some students. Normally, after the students go to court and law office for their externship programme and return to campus, we normally take them one-on-one and they do a presentation on their experience during the externship.
“Last year, a particular student while presenting hers kept mentioning L-O-Y-A as lawyer. We asked her and she didn’t see what was wrong in her saying L-O-Y-A is lawyer. The student, we then eventually found out, was from one of these quack universities. Of course, we didn’t allow her to take the examination. Now, can you imagine if you now entrust the training of that student to the university that she went to from the start to the finish? The law school is a leveler and we fish out those who are not meant to be here either from the exams or in the course of the programme.”
Also, Chairman,Planning Committee of the Nigerian Law School’s 50th Anniversary, Prof. Oyelowo Oyewo, said in the face of declining education standard in the country, the Law School was still striving to meet the needs of the ever-changing industry of legal practice.
Oyewo, who is also a former Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lagos, said the falling quality of lawyers in the country should not be blamed on the law school, but should rather be blamed on the declining standard of education in the country.
He said, “In terms of the standard declining in the educational sector, legal education is part of that. There are so many reasons accountable for that – policy inconsistency, funding, strikes and others – will definitely contribute to that. Don’t forget that the Nigerian Law School receives students from the universities and we have three levels of universities in Nigeria – the federal , the state and the private universities .
“It is from all these that students come to the law school. So it is the quality of education in the universities that you will meet in the law school. If the standards are falling from primary school, secondary school, of course, it will fall reflectively in the university.
“There could be falling standard in terms of general standard of education in Nigeria, the legal education is not free from it. But it is how we proactively address those things that will enhance the quality. I bet you, people who graduate from the law school, go to Havard and other universities across the world and they perform very well there.”
He also argued that even with the declining education standard in the country, there was no basis for comparing the current standard of education with what obtained in 1963 when the law school started.
He said, “The standard is evolving; it’s a dynamic process. The need of a lawyer in 1963 is different from that of 2013 and the challenges of the lawyering differ from age to age. That is why in the law school, they are concerned with what we call the assurance of standard and the verification of what are the needs of the industry. So you find out that the teaching methodology in 1963 is different from the teaching methodology now.”
Oyewo also called for collaboration with government in the funding of the law school. According to him, it is part of the reasons why the alumni association of the school will be inaugurated at the event of November 27 in Abuja.
He said, “There will also be the inauguration of what we call the alumni association. It is going to have its website which is going to be interactive. Then, of course, it will be like a competition between every set that has passed out of the law school in terms of what to contribute to the development of the law school.
“So it is now time for the alumni and other stakeholders apart from government to put some investments into legal education in Nigeria so that at least, we can have a higher standard in terms of infrastructure and in terms of maintenance of standard that is being thought for the law school.”
Reiterating the impact of the law school since its establishment, Olanipekun, who was the chairman of the event, described the law school as “our big elephant that should be raised shoulder-high”.
He said the school had shaped up the landscape of Nigeria positively. He therefore called on everyone who had passed out from the school to come together to “bail out our alma mater, more so when the government of the day appears not to be too much interested in the legal profession.”
According to him, apart from few Nigerian legal practitioners, others including the present and past Justices of the Supreme Court, Chief Justices of Nigeria, Justices of the Court of Appeal and Senior Advocates of Nigeria all attended the Nigerian Law School.
Olanipekun said, “We have the Nigerian Law School, the same parent that has given birth to the Nigerian Law School of diverse campuses across the country. I was looking at the list of Justices of the Supreme Court and Chief Justices of Nigeria to the newest of them - all of them attended the Nigerian Law School.
“I was also browsing through the list of the Senior Advocates of Nigeria, I could only count about 10 of them including the likes of Chief Richard Akinjide to Folake Solanke and J.O.K Ajayi, still living, that did not attend the Nigerian Law School. It means that all, with the exception of those few of the Senior Advocates of Nigeria and leading lawyers we have in the country today and Justices of the Court of Appeal, I cannot find any of them who did not attend the Nigerian Law School. All of them attended the Nigerian Law School.”
The guest lecturer, Dr. Fabian Ajogwu (SAN), called on the alumni of the Nigerian Law School to emulate the alumni association of the Havard University in the United States of America, which according to him, took care of the one-third of the university’s $20bn endowment fund.
He called for a tripartite funding of educational institutions, an arrangement, which he said should involve the students and their parents, the government and philanthropists and other well meaning members of the society.
