30/07/2026
A lawyer recently shared an experience on one of our posts.
He travelled from Abuja to another state to perfect a land transaction for his client. A client who trusted him, paid his professional fees, and covered his flight and hotel. On arrival, he discovered that only lawyers within that jurisdiction could frank the document. His client had paid for everything, including a journey that could not produce the outcome the client expected, because a branch rule created a barrier that the law itself does not create.
This is what the absence of national uniformity looks like in practice.
We have been raising questions about how some NBA branches are implementing the Remuneration Order 2023 — the branch committees trying lawyers, the percentage deductions from professional fees, the mandatory routing of payments through branch accounts, the five-million-naira fines. The uniformity problem runs through all of it. Different branches have adopted different frameworks. Some branches enforce practices that others do not. A lawyer’s obligations, and their rights, vary depending on which side of a state boundary they are standing on. This is not how a national professional body governed by a national statute is supposed to work.
The Legal Practitioners Act applies to every lawyer in Nigeria. The Rules of Professional Conduct apply to every lawyer in Nigeria. The Remuneration Order 2023 applies to every lawyer in Nigeria. What cannot be permitted, without undermining the coherence of the profession itself, is an implementation of that Order that varies from branch to branch based on whatever a local executive has resolved. There is one Nigerian Bar Association. There should be one standard.
We also want to say plainly what we have said before and will keep saying: the welfare of young lawyers is inseparable from the question of what kind of profession the NBA is building. A bar that is serious about its standards enforces remuneration rules to protect the dignity of legal practice, but also addresses the conditions in which young lawyers begin their careers. Entry-level salaries that cannot sustain a basic life in any Nigerian city. Engagements without written contracts. Labour without fair compensation. These are not separate conversations from the remuneration debate. They are part of the same conversation about what it means to value legal work and the people who do it.
The NBA election has concluded and new executives are coming in. We welcome them and we genuinely hope this transition produces the institutional seriousness these issues deserve. The time for the incoming leadership to engage these questions is now, before the patterns of the last cycle are simply inherited and continued.
We are one bar. We should act like it.
