As the new Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, settles down in office, many lawyers hope she will address the selection process for Senior Advocates of Nigeria to save the title from losing its prestige, Wale Igbintade writes
The Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, last Monday administered the oath of office to 87 lawyers elevated to the prestigious rank of the Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).
The rank SAN is awarded by the Legal Practitioners’ Privileges Committee (LPPC) as a mark of excellence to members of the legal profession who have distinguished themselves as advocates and academics. Members of the Inner Bar, as SANs are fondly called, enjoy some privileges, including having seats reserved for them in the front rows of all courts and also with priority accorded to their cases in courts. They are also distinguishable from other lawyers by their attire called ‘silk,’ which is styled differently from the gown other lawyers wear.
The LPPC had in July shortlisted 98 lawyers for the conferment of SAN rank this year. Among the list were 87 practising lawyers and 11 academic applicants.
However, many legal practitioners have raised concerns over the new conditions for lawyers wishing to attain the rank.
The concerns arose because the number of lawyers being churned out by the LPPC for the award keeps bloating for three consecutive years, while the quality keeps dropping.
Even though LPPC in 2022 announced that the application for SAN rank would be a non-refundable processing fee of N600,000, THISDAY gathered that the amount has since been reviewed to N1million.
This has sparked worry among lawyers who decried what they called the “commercialisation” and “politicisation” of the bar’s highest honour and privilege, which is similar to the United Kingdom’s rank at the inner bar known as the Queen’s Counsel (QC).
While people have different views about the rank, depending on which side of the divide they stand, some want it abolished completely as they deem it an unfair trade practice to confer special privileges on certain persons by way of ranking. Others believe that it is good to encourage healthy competition but that a lot of reform is required to make it more merit-based.
Lawyers who spoke to THISDAY, said the award of the SAN rank was supposed to be based on proven integrity by those who had developed the hard work and legal skills required. They lamented that the manner the award is being conferred now leaves much to be desired.
Some of the lawyers who did not want their names in print called for a review of the guidelines for the award of the prestigious rank. They bemoaned the huge sums involved in applying for the rank.
“N1,000,000 is just the amount, when the committee comes to inspect the offices of applicants and their libraries, they do get much more than that,” said a lawyer.
As of 2019, Nigeria had just 526 senior advocates with the first two being the late Chief Rotimi Williams and Dr. Nabo Graham-Douglas who were conferred with the title on April 3, 1975. Today, SANs are over 1,100.
Observers believe that with the large number of SANs being churned out every year, the title has not only lost quality and value, but that the number of those holding the title would be more than the number of ordinary lawyers in no distant future.
“The prestigious award has been bastardised and compromised. It is losing its value and quality because it is now given to all Tom, Dick and Harry. Like every other thing, it is now given to the highest bidders. It has also been tribalised and based on quota, and this has reduced the prestige attached to the rank,” a SAN told THISDAY.
“I think for a moment that if there was a qualifying exam to become a SAN, do you think we would have a large number of them like we have today? How many consultants and specialists do we have in the medical and other fields today? Of course, they are all few. You know why? Because they write very rigorous examinations. But to become a SAN, there are no exams,” another SAN said.
Even the sharp increase in the number of senior advocates has not gone down well with the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (BOSAN). After the release of the list of lawyers shortlisted for the rank in 2020, BOSAN wrote a letter to the then Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad, urging him not to elevate any lawyer to the premium rank until 2024 to enable them to revamp the elevation process.
BOSAN criticised the making a mockery of the elevation process with the conferment of the rank on an unprecedented number of 72 senior lawyers in the 2020 exercise. It warned that unless a holistic review of the process was undertaken by the LPPC, the rank stood the risk of losing its prestige and standing among stakeholders.
BOSAN pledged the commitment of its members to providing its expertise and support at every stage of the review process.
However, this alarm was ignored as the number of SANs keeps increasing.
In 2021, the Supreme Court placed what were supposed to be fresh hurdles for lawyers seeking to be conferred with the rank
Among others, the applicants were to face a panel of selected serving and retired Supreme Court justices and senior lawyers for an oral interview as part of the last leg of the screening process. During the oral interview, the applicants were to be subjected to rigorous interrogation to verify and confirm the authenticity of claims made in their individual application forms.
But THISDAY gathered that the selection process is still characterised by influence-peddling, favouritism, bigotry, and bribery, among others.
Recently, a retiring justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Addu Aboki, had called on the CJN and the LPPC to review the requirements for the conferment of the rank in a manner that it would reduce unnecessary pressure on the court.
He confirmed the undue pressure mounted on justices of the Supreme Court by lawyers seeking the title.
Also, another retired Justice of the Supreme Court recently attributed the overcrowding of the docket of the appellate courts to the quest by lawyers seeking SAN elevation.
Presently, every candidate who desires to be elevated to SAN is required to have at least five concluded judgments of the Court of Appeal and four concluded judgments of the Supreme Court.
Out of desperation, it is now believed that lawyers fund appeals and even revive dead ones in order to secure the minimum number of judgments to ground their application for elevation.
This is why many are suggesting that the LPPC should raise the qualification for SAN to 15 or 20 years post-call.
In 2022, Mr. Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa (SAN), proposed some far-reaching reforms to both the Supreme Court and LPPC.
According to him, the court cases to be relied upon to select successful applicants should cut across many areas of legal practice, including, civil cases such as land law, chieftaincy, commercial law cases, election petitions, matrimonial causes, constitutional law, criminal trials and other areas of law.
“We should not have a Senior Advocate who only conducted election petitions or one who only attended to NDLEA or EFCC cases with only one witness who pleaded guilty and was summarily convicted or those who handled only political cases. How do we have a SAN who cannot conduct a criminal trial? In the same vein, the cases should cover all the superior courts of records, such as the High Court, Federal High Court and the National Industrial Court and indeed the appellate courts,” he explained.
He further said: “Why should a law teacher apply for the rank of SAN if he has never practised and has no intention to ever practise law? This does not derogate from the value of law teachers but that career path is totally different from courtroom advocacy. Law teachers who also practise law as advocates should only apply for the rank as advocates.
“For all categories of awardees, none should be considered for the rank if he/she is not an active member of any of the sections of the NBA, has not attended at least five consecutive meetings of his local NBA and provided concrete evidence of active participation in NBA affairs,” he added.
Analysts expect the new CJN, Justice Kekere-Ekun, to sanity to the selection process so as to restore the rank’s dwindling glory.