- Say lack of inter-disciplinary modules affecting lawyers
The Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo (SAN); founder of Afe Babalola University (ABUAD), Ado-Ekiti, Chief Afe Babalola (SAN) and President of Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Mr. Olumide Akpata, have identified obsolete curriculum as one of the biggest challenges confronting the country’s legal education.
The Guardian reports that they stressed the need for holistic overhaul of the curriculum to reflect the contemporary realities, saying the existing one had not kept pace with global development and societal needs.
They said that knowledge of legal principles and theory alone does not make good lawyers. They made the call in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital yesterday, at the 2022 Legal Education Summit organised by the NBA in collaboration with Afe Babalola University.
Osinbajo lamented that the Nigerian Law Schools were still producing lawyers that could not measure up to contemporary benchmark and global best practices in the legal profession, adding that a well-articulated review of the obsolete curriculum would ensure a critical role in ensuring that law graduates acquire qualitative legal education and compete favourably with their contemporaries.
The Vice President, who spoke through virtual broadcast, emphasised the need for law graduates to be subjected to intense practical training and also be exposed to the mastery of intricacies of the legal profession.
Babalola, who advocated a Central Law School, faulted the recent creation of six new schools, saying that the proliferation of the training grounds would not solve the problem of access to legal education.
He noted that the best way to address the problem of access to quality legal education was to establish centralised law school with modern facilities and seasoned faculty members of international repute.
In his submission, Akpata urged need for review of the curriculum, saying experience with fresh law graduates had shown that they lack the requisite knowledge to fit into today’s law practice.
He lamented that the curriculum being used in the universities and the Nigerian Law School had hardly changed over the years, saying that there is urgent need to review the present curriculum to meet the global developmental challenge.
Also The Punch reports that in his speech, the NBA President urged the National Assembly not to see legal education as constituency projects, which the proliferation of law school campuses connoted.
He said legal education was too important to be reduced to constituency projects, querying, “How do you set up law school campuses when you cannot finance them?”
Akpata said the summit was conceptualised to intervene in legal education and fashion out policies that could inject sound legal education in the country.
Speaking on the establishment of six new law school campuses, he stated, “The National Assembly should bear in mind that the existing campuses are grossly underfunded and that it would be wrong to establish more under this context.”
The NBA president also appealed to the Federal Government to reach an agreement with the Academic Staff Union of Universities so that lecturers could return to work and save the country’s ivory towers from total collapse.
Akpata stated, “Our government should stop paying lip service to the issue. The government needs to get serious about how it wants to run education in Nigeria right from budgetary allocation.
“Education at all levels must get the seriousness it deserves. Let the government fulfil its own side of the pact. Government should quickly do what is necessary to open our schools for normal activities. Strike and school closure have recurred over and over again.
“With time, the brand ‘Nigerian trained’ may become an albatross, because employers will start asking how you were trained. So, it is important for the government to resolve the issue if they think the education of the Nigerian children is still important.
“We are going to be looking at our curriculum. We will also look at technology. We are also looking at our teaching methodology, quality assurance and the issue of the decentralisation of the Nigerian Law School.”
The Chairman, 2022 Planning Summit and ABUAD Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Prof Damilola Olawuyi, stated that the summit was geared to reset the system, since policy makers in Nigeria had come to the realisation that the legal education system had declined geometrically.
Olawuyi said discussants at the event, which would be declared open by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, included the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami; Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu; Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission, Prof Abubakar Rasheed; and ABUAD founder, Aare Afe Babalola.
