Kola’ Awodein SAN, FCTI, FICIArb & Misbau Alamu Lateef, Ph.D., SFHEA
… The appellate structure established by the Constitution is deliberate, hierarchical and exhaustive. No Act of the National Assembly can enlarge that jurisdiction beyond the limits expressly prescribed by the Constitution. Consequently, I hold that Section 12(7) of the Legal Practitioners Act, to the extent that it purports to confer a direct right of appeal from the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee to this Court, is inconsistent with Sections 233 and 240 of the Constitution and is therefore void by virtue of Section 1(3) thereof. I further hold that the decision of this Court in Okike v LPDC (2005) 3-4 SC 49, insofar as it recognised and exercised such appellate jurisdiction, was reached without full consideration of the relevant constitutional framework and cannot be allowed to stand as a correct statement of the law, and to that extent, the said decision is hereby overruled …
– per Mohammed Baba Idris JSC in Ben Mene-Ejegi v NBA
… We have argued elsewhere that the apex court owes a duty of courage to confront its own erroneous or per incuriam pronouncements, rather than to perpetuate them. Mene-Ejegi vindicates that thesis. For too long the apex court has been hesitant to confront and resolve its contrary decisions or anomalous prior precedents. This judicial reticence has permitted contradictory positions to linger in our jurisprudence and has continued to cause great legal uncertainty. The approach in Ben Mene-Ejegi v Nigerian Bar Association is a refreshing and commendable departure from this trend and will, we hope, signal a return to jurisprudential clarity …
– Kola Awodein and Misbau Alamu Lateef
… Yet the Court has done only half of what the profession now requires, and it could do no more: it has closed an unconstitutional door, but it is for the other branches to build a lawful one. The temptation, understandably, is to build it in haste – a single clause, quickly passed, routing LPDC appeals to the Court of Appeal. We have sought to show why that temptation should be resisted: the quick fix is, by the very reasoning of Mene-Ejegi, open to serious constitutional challenge, and a cure that may itself be struck down is worse than no cure at all. Creating an appellate mechanism for decisions of the LPDC by ordinary legislation of the National Assembly is problematic and may likely be struck down as unconstitutional …
– Kola Awodein and Misbau Alamu Lateef
I. Introduction
1. For more than a decade, one deceptively simple question has divided the Nigerian legal profession: when the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (“the LPDC”) sanctions a legal practitioner, where does that practitioner appeal? In Ben Mene-Ejegi Esq v Nigerian Bar Association and Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee, delivered on 26 June 2026, a full panel of seven Justices of the Supreme Court – coram, Tijjani Abubakar, Emmanuel Agim, Chidiebere Uwa, Moore Adumein, Obande Ogbuinya, Habeeb Abiru and Mohammed Baba Idris JJSC – in a lead judgement delivered by Mohammed Baba Idris JSC, answered that question with finality, and, in answering it, opened a gap in the appellate structure of professional discipline that, it is argued here, only deliberate constitutional reform can now close.
2. This article has a twofold purpose. First, it commends, without reservation, the courage of the Apex Court in raising the question of its own jurisdiction suo motu, confronting a precedent that had stood for two decades, and overruling itself in the service of constitutional fidelity. Self-correction of that order is a constitutional virtue, and it is one we have severally called upon the Court to display. Secondly, and by way of caution, this article interrogates the remedy that has quickly gained currency in professional and legislative circles – the proposal that the National Assembly need only insert a single clause into the Legal Practitioners Act (“the LPA”) routing appeals from the LPDC to the Court of Appeal. Attractive though that quick fix appears, we respectfully argue that it is itself constitutionally vulnerable, and especially so by the very logic of Mene-Ejegi itself.
3. Our thesis is therefore twofold. The decision in Mene-Ejegi is right, and the boldness behind it is to be celebrated, but the cure now being canvassed may prove to be a constitutional cul-de-sac. Whether the legislature routes an appeal from the LPDC back to the Supreme Court or forward to the Court of Appeal, ordinary legislation alone cannot, we argue, secure it against the reasoning of Mene-Ejegi; the sound and durable path is not an ordinary amendment improvised in haste, but a constitutional amendment that supplies the foundation the Constitution presently withholds, followed by enabling legislation deliberately designed for swift and fair resolution. We advance this caution now, before any hurried Bill hardens into law – indeed, as we shall show, before a Bill that reproduces the very defect concurs through the National Assembly – precisely because, as the apex court has just reminded the profession, fidelity to the constitutional architecture cannot be sacrificed on the altar of convenience.
4. This intervention is, in a sense, a sequel to our earlier critique of the Supreme Court’s power and duty to revisit its own pronouncements, in which we argued that the so-called “conflicting decisions” of the Court are frequently mischaracterised and that the apex court owes a duty of courage to correct, rather than perpetuate, its errors. Mene-Ejegi is, in no small measure, the Court walking the very path we there mapped. This intervention proceeds as follows: Part II sets out the decision; Part III commends its self-correcting boldness; Part IV reframes the “conflicting decisions” narrative; Part V examines the appellate vacuum the decision leaves behind; Part VI interrogates the popular quick fix; Part VII turns to the Legal Practitioners Bill 2025 now before the National Assembly; Part VIII proposes the constitutionally sound alternative; and Part IX addresses the design imperatives of swift justice and fair hearing, before we conclude.
II. The Decision in Ben Mene-Ejegi
5. The appellant, a legal practitioner practising in Warri, faced a two-count complaint before the LPDC. It was alleged that, by false pretence, he received the sum of ₦1,600,000 from one Tosan Olukpe as the purchase price for land at Ajah-Etan Close, Warri, which did not belong to him, and that he refused to refund the sum despite repeated demands – conduct said to be infamous in a professional sense, contrary to Rule 1 of the Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners 2007 and punishable under the LPA. The Committee found both counts proved, directed the Chief Registrar of the Supreme Court to strike the appellant’s name off the Roll of Legal Practitioners, and ordered a refund. He appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
6. The appeal did not, however, turn on the misconduct findings. The debate that had followed the apex court’s decision in Osuji v LPDC – a debate that had engaged the Nigerian Bar Association, the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria and the Body of Benchers – prompted the Court, by a letter dated 8 April 2026, to invite all counsel to address a single, anterior question: does the Supreme Court possess jurisdiction to entertain an appeal directly from a direction of the LPDC? Notably, all three counsel for the appellant, for the Nigerian Bar Association and for the LPDC alike, urged the Court to hold that it does. The Court disagreed with all of them. That unanimity of error also underscores a wider institutional point: in systemically significant cases of this kind, the Court might profitably invoke its power to invite amici curiae so as to widen the pool of argument available to it.
7. Before turning to the merits of that question, the Court addressed the propriety of raising jurisdiction suo motu. It reaffirmed the settled rule that a court raising an issue on its own motion must ordinarily hear the parties before deciding it, while recognising the established exceptions – including where the issue relates to the court’s own jurisdiction, an exception that is itself not beyond debate. In any event, the apex court had invited full argument so that no question of procedural unfairness could arise.
8. The Court’s reasoning then proceeded in two movements, and the order of those movements is significant. It first settled which version of the LPA was valid and applicable. Tracing the statutory history, the Court proceeded upon the Act as amended by the Legal Practitioners (Amendment) Decree No 21 of 1994, incorporated in the revised edition Cap L11, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 – holding, in line with the submissions before it, that the inadvertent omission of the 1994 amendment from the 2004 compilation did not amount to a repeal, and that the amended Act, under which the LPDC sits as a standing committee of the Body of Benchers and section 12(7) supplies the appeal provision, remained the operative law. Having accepted that version as the true Act, the Court then turned to strike down its appeal provision.
9. On the constitutional question, the apex court began from first principles. Jurisdiction, it observed, is the lifeblood of adjudication, and this Court, being a creature of the Constitution, may exercise only such jurisdiction as the Constitution confers. Section 232 deals with the Court’s original jurisdiction and does not extend to appellate matters. The Court’s appellate jurisdiction is governed instead by section 233, which vests in it jurisdiction to hear and determine appeals from the Court of Appeal. Reading those provisions in the light of the settled canons of constitutional construction, the Court held the position to be exhaustive:
A careful and dispassionate reading of these provisions leaves no room for doubt that the appellate jurisdiction of this Court is confined, strictly and exclusively, to appeals emanating from the Court of Appeal. No other court, tribunal, or body is contemplated by the Constitution as a source of appeals directly to this Court.
– per Baba Idris JSC, pp. 36-37.
10. The Court then drew the decisive contrast between sections 233 and 240. Whereas section 240 expressly permits the appellate jurisdiction of the Court of Appeal to be enlarged by an Act of the National Assembly – embracing appeals “from decisions of a court martial or other tribunals as may be prescribed by an Act of the National Assembly” – section 233 contains no such enabling language in respect of the Supreme Court. That difference, the Court held, is deliberate. Invoking the maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius, it reasoned that the express provision for legislative enlargement of the Court of Appeal’s jurisdiction, set against its conspicuous absence for the Supreme Court, signals a considered constitutional design rather than an oversight. The point had been made decades earlier by Karibi-Whyte JSC in AG Oyo State v Fairlakes Hotel Ltd, whose observation that the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over the Court of Appeal, unlike the Court of Appeal’s own jurisdiction, is not made subject to the provisions of the Constitution, the Court adopted with approval.
11. From this the Court concluded that the omission is, in its own words, “neither accidental nor inadvertent; it is deliberate, significant, and must be accorded its full constitutional effect.” The National Assembly’s legislative competence over the legal profession, wide though it is, remains subject to the supremacy of the Constitution; it cannot be exercised so as to enlarge the appellate jurisdiction the Constitution has exhaustively fixed. Accordingly:
It follows, therefore, that any statutory provision, including Section 12(7) of the Legal Practitioners Act, which purports to confer a right of direct appeal from the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee to this Court, must yield to the supremacy of the Constitution. By virtue of Section 1(3) of the Constitution, such a provision is null and void to the extent of its inconsistency.
– per Baba Idris JSC, p. 42.
12. The Court then confronted its own earlier decision in Okike v LPDC, which had upheld a direct right of appeal from the LPDC. It held that the constitutional implications of sections 233 and 240 had not been examined in Okike against the backdrop of the settled principles of constitutional interpretation, and that, had they been so examined, the conclusion might well have been different. To the extent that Okike recognised and exercised such appellate jurisdiction, it could not be reconciled with the clear provisions of the Constitution and was accordingly overruled. The appeal was struck out for want of jurisdiction, the Court holding that the only constitutionally recognised route by which an appeal may reach it is through the Court of Appeal.
13. One further holding deserves emphasis. The Court observed that the former requirement – that a party desirous of inviting the Court to depart from a previous decision give express notice of that intention – as under Order 6 rule 5(4) of the Supreme Court Rules 2014 – has no equivalent in the Supreme Court Rules 2024. From that omission the Court drew a striking conclusion:
The power of this Court to revisit and, where necessary, depart from its previous decisions is not dependent upon an invitation by counsel. Rather, it inheres in the constitutional status of this Court as the final judicial authority in the Federation.
– per Baba Idris JSC, p. 52.
14. We would, however, respectfully disagree with the Court on the reasoning by which it reached the above conclusion. The former requirement of notice was procedural in purpose: it existed so that the opposing party and the Bench alike could prepare to meet a proposed departure from precedent. Its removal in the 2024 Rules neither precludes counsel from inviting the Court, in an appropriate case, to revisit a previous decision, nor can it be read as freshly vesting in the Court a power it previously lacked. The Supreme Court has always possessed the inherent authority to depart from its own precedent; to treat the removal of a procedural rule as the genesis of an inherent constitutional power is, with considerable respect, flawed.
15. But the Court’s conclusion is unassailable. Authority to correct constitutional error rests in the Court’s own constitutional status. That authority carries its own indispensable discipline: fidelity to fair hearing. Thus, it is one thing for the Court to depart from precedent without a formal invitation; it is another to determine a decisive question without hearing the parties. Fidelity to the fundamental right of fair hearing mandates every court, the Supreme Court included, to invite counsel to address a jurisdictional issue it raises suo motu before pronouncing upon it – as the Court properly did here, by inviting full argument. That equilibrium is the right one, and future panels would do well to preserve it.
16. Finally, one clarification is worth making on the final decision in this case. The appellant did not succeed on the merits and was not vindicated. The Court never reached the misconduct findings, the striking-off, or the refund order; the appeal was struck out for want of jurisdiction, and the disciplinary findings against him stand untouched. Mene-Ejegi is a decision about the architecture of appeals, not about the innocence of the practitioner who happened to be its occasion.
III. Commending the Boldness: Self-Correction as Constitutional Virtue
17. It is difficult to overstate the institutional courage that Mene-Ejegi displays and its significance. The apex court raised the jurisdictional question on its own motion; it received the unanimous submission of all counsel that it possessed jurisdiction; and it nonetheless declined jurisdiction by overruling a contrary decision that had stood, and been acted upon, for more than twenty years. An apex court rarely finds itself invited by every party before it to reach one conclusion, only to reach the opposite in defence of the Constitution. That is precisely what occurred here.
18. We have argued elsewhere that the apex court owes a duty of courage to confront its own erroneous or per incuriam pronouncements, rather than to perpetuate them. Mene-Ejegi vindicates that thesis. The Court did not shelter behind the comfort of an established authority; it asked whether that authority could be reconciled with the Constitution, found that it could not, and acted accordingly. For too long the apex court has been hesitant to confront and resolve its contrary decisions or anomalous prior precedents. That judicial reticence has permitted contradictory positions to linger in our jurisprudence and to cause great legal uncertainty. The approach in Mene-Ejegi is a refreshing and commendable departure from this trend and will, we hope, signal a return to jurisprudential clarity.
19. The Court situated its decision within the Nigerian jurisprudence on stare decisis. It reaffirmed that precedent is an indispensable foundation of the legal order, adopting Lord Morris’s words in Conway v Rimmer as approved in Bucknor-Maclean v Inlaks Ltd, and recalling the settled instances – in which the Court may depart from its earlier decisions, foremost among them where the previous decision is inconsistent with the Constitution or erroneous in law. Yet it declined to treat precedent as an inflexible dogma. In a passage that captures the balance between certainty and justice, the Court observed that “the law is not a fossil preserved in the museum of antiquity” but “a living and dynamic instrument.” And it made explicit the ordering of loyalties that governed its decision:
While this Court remains committed to the doctrine of stare decisis, it cannot permit fidelity to precedent to override fidelity to the Constitution. Where an earlier decision is shown to be inconsistent with the Constitution, the demands of constitutional supremacy outweigh the demands of precedent.
– per Baba Idris JSC, p. 51.
IV. The “Conflicting Decisions” Reframed
20. Dr Atake SAN, in a lucid and valuable commentary on the decision, frames the pre-Mene-Ejegi landscape as a contest between “two schools of thought, each with the Supreme Court behind it”: one stream that treated the 1994-amended Act as correct and entertained direct appeals, and another that followed the uncorrected 2004 compilation and struck such appeals out, insisting they proceed through an Appeal Committee that no longer existed. His archaeology of the “one Act, several printings” problem – the 1962, 1975 and 1994 versions, the inadvertent omission from the 2004 compilation, and the corrective 2014 reprint – is careful and persuasive, and we gratefully adopt it as the factual backdrop to what follows. We would enter one qualification, though. The force of the operative amendment derives from the 1994 Decree itself, not from the 2014 reprint; the latter, we have argued elsewhere, was an exercise in executive overreach that carried no force of law, even though the apex court appeared in a few cases (such as Nwalutu v NBA) to rely upon it.
21. We would, notwithstanding, press the respected Dr Atake’s analysis a step further than the metaphor of “two schools” permits, for it bears directly on the thesis of our earlier work. On close inspection, the two lines of authority were not in genuine doctrinal conflict on the same question. The one line answered a statutory question – which printing of the Act was the authentic text – and, having answered it in favour of the 1994 version, entertained the appeal that the version appeared to authorise. The other line, proceeding upon the uncorrected 2004 text, answered a procedural-competence question generated by that very text. What neither line squarely confronted was the constitutional question that governs both: whether, on any version of the statute, a direct appeal to the Supreme Court could constitutionally lie at all.
22. Seen in that light, much of the celebrated “conflict” was, as we have argued before, more apparent than real – an artefact of a compilation error rather than a true division of legal principle. Mene-Ejegi dissolves it by relocating the entire debate to the constitutional plane and holding that even the “correct” statutory text cannot achieve what the Constitution forbids. This is precisely the pattern our earlier study identified: apparent inconsistencies in the Court’s output that resolve, on rigorous analysis, into a coherent constitutional position once the right question is asked.
V. The Appellate Vacuum: What Stands, What Is Void, and What Is Not Revived
23. The immediate consequence of the decision must be stated plainly, for it is grave. Three things follow. First, what stands: the LPDC itself, its composition, and its power to try and sanction erring practitioners remain good law; the disciplinary machinery is wholly unaffected. Secondly, what is void: section 12(7) of the LPA, in so far as it purported to confer a direct appeal to the Supreme Court, is a nullity. Thirdly, what does not revive: the old Appeal Committee of the Body of Benchers, abolished by the 1994 Decree upon which the Court proceeded, is not resurrected – and, as Dr Atake rightly observes, even were it to return, its own final rung to the Supreme Court would fall to precisely the same constitutional objection.
24. The result is that, as of 26 June 2026, a legal practitioner struck off the Roll or suspended by the LPDC has no statutory right of appeal to any juridical body whatsoever. The direct road to the Supreme Court is void; the committee road was repealed in 1994; and the road the Court itself points to, through the Court of Appeal, does not yet exist, because no Act of the National Assembly presently prescribes an appeal from the LPDC to that Court. What remains to the aggrieved practitioner is not an appeal at all, but the residual supervisory jurisdiction of the ordinary courts over the legality of the proceedings – questions of jurisdiction, composition and fair hearing of the kind established in LPDC v Fawehinmi – together with the separate statutory liberty to apply for restoration to the Roll.
25. That this vacuum is not merely theoretical is already vividly demonstrated. Within weeks of the decision, a senior advocate of Nigeria, sanctioned by the LPDC – unable to appeal because the direct route is now void – resorted instead to the Federal High Court, seeking leave to apply for judicial review and an order of certiorari to remove and quash the Committee’s direction. In Gadzama v The Body of Benchers, the Federal High Court, per Egwuatu J, granted leave ex parte on 20 August 2026 in respect of the LPDC’s direction in Complaint No BB/LPDC/1314/2024, the substantive application to be filed within seven days and the matter adjourned for hearing.
26. The episode is instructive precisely because certiorari is not an appeal. Judicial review is supervisory, not appellate: it tests the legality of the disciplinary process – jurisdiction, composition, fair hearing – and not the merits of the Committee’s findings. That a Silk should be driven to collateral review at first instance, rather than to an orderly appeal on the merits, is the clearest possible confirmation of the diagnosis: the removal of the unconstitutional door has left no lawful door standing open, and practitioners are already improvising their way around the void. The attendant difficulties – the LPDC’s direction arguably taking immediate effect, the practitioner’s professional standing suspended in the meantime, and the disorderly multiplication of collateral proceedings – are not incidental. They are the predictable fruit of an appellate vacuum, and they lend urgency to the question of the cure.
VI. Interrogating the Quick Fix
27. The remedy that has gained rapid currency – and which Dr Atake advances – is disarmingly simple. Let the National Assembly amend the LPA to provide, in a single clause, that an appeal shall lie from any direction of the LPDC to the Court of Appeal; from the Court of Appeal, section 233 will then carry the matter to the Supreme Court in the ordinary way. One clause, on this view, repairs the whole structure and gives the sanctioned practitioner what the Constitution promises everyone else: a hearing and an appeal.
28. The proposal has force, and it must be met at its strongest rather than at its weakest. Section 240 expressly contemplates appeals to the Court of Appeal “from decisions of a court martial or other tribunals as may be prescribed by an Act of the National Assembly”, and the LPDC – a statutory disciplinary body established under an Act of the National Assembly – sits naturally within the category of “other tribunals”. Section 246(2) reinforces the point, empowering the National Assembly to confer jurisdiction upon the Court of Appeal to hear appeals from “any other court of law or tribunal established by the National Assembly”. Statutes routinely route appeals from tribunals to the Court of Appeal, and they are seldom the subject of constitutional challenge. On the orthodox view, therefore, a single enabling clause is not merely convenient; it is exactly what section 240 invites.
29. We accept the distinction on which the proposal ultimately rests – between rights of appeal created by the Constitution itself and those created by ordinary legislation – as analytically sound as far as it goes. With respect, however, it proves too much. Section 240 confers upon the Court of Appeal the capacity to receive appeals from prescribed tribunals, but it is entirely silent as to the ambit, the grounds, the parties entitled to appeal, the conditions of leave, the time within which the right is to be exercised, and the mode of its exercise. For the superior courts of record that the Constitution itself establishes, by contrast, the Constitution is meticulous: sections 241 to 245 create the rights of appeal, define their ambit, and regulate who may exercise them and how. The framers plainly knew how to spell out the mechanics of an appellate right when they intended one to exist as a matter of constitutional guarantee.
30.Their silence in respect of section 240 tribunals is therefore not, in our respectful view, a casual delegation of regulatory power to the legislature; it is a structural omission. Read through the same lens the Court applied in Mene-Ejegi – expressio unius est exclusio alterius, and the insistence that a constitutional omission may be “neither accidental nor inadvertent” but “deliberate” and to be given “its full constitutional effect” – the Constitution’s failure to articulate a freestanding, fully-incident right of appeal from prescribed tribunals is at least capable of being construed as a limitation rather than an invitation.The assumption that the bare power to “prescribe” a tribunal necessarily carries with it the power to legislate the entire appellate architecture – grounds, parties, leave, time and finality – where the Constitution itself is silent, is, though a seemingly logical inference, one that the Supreme Court, following Mene-Ejegi, may very well decline to accept. This interpretation of the provision is deeply problematic. It would grant the National Assembly an all but unrestricted power to invent the mechanism of appeal as it pleased – including, for example, requiring a litigant to obtain leave from the very tribunal appealed against – and it would risk fragmenting the appellate jurisdiction of the Court of Appeal, governing it not by uniform constitutional standards but by a multiplicity of disparate Acts pertaining to different tribunals, and, in effect, subordinating that Court to the statutory rules of inferior bodies. So construed, the provision would, we respectfully submit, be highly vulnerable to constitutional challenge and strike-down.
31. That the assumption is contestable is clear. By parity of reasoning with the section 233 holding, if the National Assembly cannot by ordinary legislation create an appellate route the Constitution has withheld from the Supreme Court, it is at least strongly arguable that it cannot, by ordinary legislation alone, supply the appellate incidents the Constitution has declined to supply for section 240 tribunals. Neither the Court of Appeal Rules, which are subsidiary legislation, nor the amending statute, which is ordinary law, can cure a defect that is constitutional in origin. Where the Constitution has neither provided the mechanism nor clearly authorised anyone else to provide it, an attempt to do so risks being characterised as an impermissible constitutional amendment dressed in the clothing of ordinary legislation – the very species of legislative encroachment against which Mene-Ejegi set its face.
32. We are careful not to overstate the argument. We do not assert that an amendment of the LPA founded on section 240 would be struck down; still less that it is void on its face. We say something more measured and, in our view, more defensible: that the popular quick fix rests on an assumption that, after Mene-Ejegi, can no longer be taken for granted; that it is vulnerable to a serious and respectable constitutional challenge; and that the matter is not nearly as clear-cut as the elegance of the single clause suggests. Given a court that has just declared the appellate structure “deliberate, hierarchical and exhaustive” and shown that it will guard that structure suo motu, a reform enacted in the shadow of this decision will be scrutinised as the routine tribunal-appeal statutes of an earlier era never were. To legislate the cure without confronting that risk is to invite the next round of litigation – and to leave the profession, once more, in prolonged uncertainty.
VII. The Legal Practitioners Bill 2025: Genuine Reform, but the Appellate Void Remains
33. The foregoing is not merely academic. Even as the profession debates the cure, the National Assembly is advancing a comprehensive Legal Practitioners Act (Repeal and Re-enactment) Bill, which repeals the existing Act and re-enacts the entire regulatory framework. The Senate passed the Bill on 9 July 2026, and it now awaits concurrence in the House of Representatives and harmonisation before transmission for executive assent. In important respects the Bill is a genuine and overdue modernisation. Among its notable innovations are the separation of the investigative and prosecutorial functions from the adjudicative, through a dedicated Ethics, Adherence and Enforcement Committee charged with investigating and prosecuting misconduct before the LPDC; a thorough overhaul of the Body of Benchers, which is granted corporate status, permanent rule-making powers and enhanced financial autonomy; and an expansion of the LPDC’s sanctioning powers to embrace mandatory financial restitution to those wronged by professional misconduct. These are constructive reforms, and we do not gainsay them.
34. On the single question with which this article is concerned – however, the route by which a sanctioned practitioner may appeal – the Bill does not advance matters. Its appeal provision, section 18(5), provides that a practitioner aggrieved by a direction of the Disciplinary Committee “may, at any time within 28 days … appeal against the directive to the Supreme Court.” That is section 12(7) of the old Act carried forward – the very direct-to-Supreme-Court route that Mene-Ejegi has declared void. We do not suggest, and would not suggest, that the legislature acted in disregard of the decision. The Bill was passed barely two weeks after the judgement was delivered, and a written judgment of the apex court is frequently unavailable to the public – and often to the legislature itself – for some weeks after delivery; it is entirely possible, and in our view likely, that the Bill was settled without the benefit of the Court’s reasoning. But the consequence is the same whatever the explanation: were section 18(5) enacted in its present form, it would be stillborn – unconstitutional on the day of its commencement, for precisely the reasons the Court gave.
35. With the decision in Mene-Ejegi, there must now necessarily be a rethink of the subsequent provisions, including Section 18(6), which provides that a direction takes immediate effect “unless an order of the Supreme Court directs otherwise”. -Therein lies the challenge that has been thrown up and the immense difficulty arising therefrom.
36. The natural response, once the difficulty is appreciated, will be to redirect the appeal from the LPDC to the Court of Appeal rather than to the Supreme Court. That instinct is right in its direction of travel, but, as we argued in Part VI, ordinary legislation alone, which can undoubtedly create a right of appeal, cannot validly provide the appellate incidents the Constitution has declined to supply for section 240 tribunals.
This is why we write while the Bill is still before the National Assembly to underscore the point that the matter truly requires much further and deeper consideration.
VIII. The Sound Path: Amendment, Not Improvisation
37. If the ordinary quick fix is constitutionally fragile, what is the sound path? In our view, it is a constitutional amendment – a new provision, whether styled section 243A or otherwise – that supplies the very foundation the Constitution presently lacks: one that not merely permits appeals from the LPDC (and, sensibly, from comparable professional and statutory tribunals) but also preferably defines, or expressly authorises the National Assembly to define, the ambit, grounds, parties, leave and procedure of such appeals. Such an amendment might, in the interest of expedition, constitute the Court of Appeal the final court for LPDC appeals, as the Constitution already does for certain election petitions. Only upon that secure constitutional footing can enabling legislation be enacted that is beyond the reach of the objection canvassed in Part VI.
38. We do not underestimate the cost of this counsel. A constitutional amendment is a longer and politically more demanding road than the insertion of a clause into an existing act. But the supremacy of the Constitution, which Mene-Ejegi so emphatically and rightly vindicated, demands nothing less. The alternative – to pretend that ordinary legislation can repair a constitutional defect – purchases speed at the price of durability and sustainability and risks a further round of judicial invalidation that would leave the profession worse off than before: not merely without a remedy, but with a remedy struck down. It is better to build the appellate route once, on foundations that will hold, than to embarrassingly build it twice.
39. We anticipate the objection that appeals from tribunals to the Court of Appeal are commonplace and have long gone unchallenged, and we do not dismiss it. But the LPDC context is no longer an ordinary one. The Supreme Court has trained a constitutional spotlight on the constitutional architecture of appeals, and it has signalled, unmistakably, that it will not permit that architecture to be enlarged by ordinary means. A cure legislated in these conditions cannot borrow the untroubled confidence of statutes passed before the spotlight fell. Prudence counsels that the foundation be laid at the constitutional level so that the edifice built upon it is secure.
IX. Designing for Swift Justice and Fair Hearing
40.Even were a Court of Appeal route constitutionally secure, a further and independent difficulty would remain: delay. The dockets of both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court are heavily congested, and election matters – which enjoy constitutional and statutory priority – have further compressed the time available for other business. A full appellate journey from the LPDC to the Court of Appeal and thence to the Supreme Court could consume years. In the meantime, considerations of fairness may require that the practitioner’s sanction be stayed; and a stay enduring for years would compromise the very interests the disciplinary system exists to protect -the public, whose protection from further harm is delayed, and the profession, whose authority is suspended – while leaving the practitioner’s reputation in indefinite limbo.
41. It follows that the reform must be designed not merely to be constitutionally valid but to deliver swift justice. Whatever appellate route is ultimately chosen should be engineered for expedition – through firm time limits, a streamlined or specialised appellate mechanism, and carefully calibrated rights of onwards appeal, which should include serious consideration of making the Court of Appeal the final destination of such appeals – so as to hold in balance the protection of the public, the dignity of the profession, and the fair-hearing rights of the practitioner. A route that is constitutionally impeccable but practically interminable would be a hollow victory.
42. Expedition alone, however, will not protect the public if sanctions are held in abeyance while appeals run their course. The reform – constitutional and legislative alike – should therefore state explicitly that an appeal, whether to the Court of Appeal or to any interim review panel, shall not of itself operate as a stay of the LPDC’s disciplinary direction. A direction striking off or suspending a practitioner should take effect upon delivery: the practitioner should cease to appear in court and cease to operate client trust accounts forthwith, subject only to a narrowly ring-fenced discretion – vested in the appellate court – to grant a stay in defined and exceptional circumstances. The current bill already embraces the principle of immediate effect in section 18(6); what it lacks is a functioning body to administer the exception, its safety valve having been vested in a court that cannot lawfully act. A sound reform would preserve the immediate-effect default while lodging the stay discretion where it can lawfully and swiftly be exercised.
X. Conclusion
43. Ben Mene-Ejegi is, in the finest sense, a decision of an apex court doing its constitutional duty. Faced with a precedent it had followed for two decades and pressed by every party before it to follow it once more, the Court chose fidelity to the Constitution over the comfort of stare decisis, raised the issue suo motu, and corrected its own error. We commend that boldness without qualification – the more so because we had ourselves urged the Court to summon precisely this courage. The Court’s affirmed capacity to correct its own errors – while remaining bound by the requirement of a fair hearing – is a valuable addition to our constitutional jurisprudence.
44. Yet the Court has done only half of what the profession now requires, and it could do no more: it has closed an unconstitutional door, but it is for the other branches to build a lawful one. The temptation, understandably, is to build it in haste – a single clause, quickly passed, routing LPDC appeals to the Court of Appeal. We have sought to show why that temptation should be resisted: the quick fix is, by the very reasoning of Mene-Ejegi, open to serious constitutional challenge, and a cure that may itself be struck down is worse than no cure at all. The sound path is the deliberate one – a constitutional amendment that lays the foundation and enabling legislation designed for swift and fair resolution.
45. The pen now lies with the profession, the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation and the National Assembly. We would respectfully urge that it be wielded deliberately rather than hurriedly. The issues here are too consequential – for the protection of the public, for the dignity of the Bar, and for the fair-hearing rights of the individual practitioner – to be resolved in a rush. If the cure is legislated without being thought through, the profession will only have shot itself in the foot. Having, in Mene-Ejegi, been the beneficiary of the Supreme Court’s constitutional rigour, the entire profession should now answer that rigour in kind.
TABLE OF CASES
AG Oyo State and Anor v Fairlakes Hotel Ltd (1988) LPELR-24926(SC)
Akintokun v LPDC (2014) 13 NWLR (Pt 1423) 1
Aladejobi v NBA (2013) 15 NWLR (Pt 1376) 66
Attorney-General, Abia State v Attorney-General, Federation (2002) 6 NWLR (Pt 763) 264
Attorney-General, Bendel State v Attorney-General, Federation (1981) 10 SC 1
Ben Mene-Ejegi Esq v Nigerian Bar Association and Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee, SC/481/2018 (Supreme Court of Nigeria, 26 June 2026, unreported)
Bucknor-Maclean v Inlaks Ltd (1980) 8-11 SC 1
Cardoso v Daniel (1986) 2 NWLR (Pt 20) 1
Conway v Rimmer [1968] AC 910; [1968] 1 All ER 874
Edede v Attorney-General of the Federation and Anor (2025) LPELR-82109(SC)
Gbagbarigha v Toruemi and Anor (2012) LPELR-15535(SC)
Gbenoba v LPDC (2021) LPELR-53064(SC); (2021) 6 NWLR (Pt 1773) 499
INEC v Musa (2003) LPELR-24927(SC)
Joe Kyari Gadzama SAN v The Body of Benchers and Ors, Suit No FHC/ABJ/CS/1954/2026 (Federal High Court of Nigeria, Abuja Judicial Division, Enrolled Order of Egwuatu J, 20 August 2026)
Kalejaiye v LPDC (2019) 8 NWLR (Pt 1674) 365
LPDC v Fawehinmi (1985) 2 NWLR (Pt 7) 300
Marwa and Ors v Nyako and Ors (2012) LPELR-7837(SC)
Nnubia v Attorney-General, Rivers State (2009) 40 NSCQR 90
Nwalutu v NBA (2019) 8 NWLR (Pt 1673) 174
Okike v LPDC (No 1) (2005) 3-4 SC 49
Osuji v LPDC (2025) 17 NWLR (Pt 2014) 317
TABLE OF LEGISLATION AND BILLS
Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended)
Legal Practitioners Act, Cap L11, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 (as amended)
Legal Practitioners (Amendment) Decree No 21 of 1994
Legal Practitioners Bill 2025 (HB 2648)
Revised Edition (Laws of the Federation of Nigeria) Act 2007
Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners 2007
Supreme Court Rules 2014
Supreme Court Rules 2024
SECONDARY SOURCES
Atake E, ‘One Act, Two Versions, and Now No Appeal: The Supreme Court’s Judgment in Mene-Ejegi v NBA’ (Law and Society Magazine, 31 July 2026) <https://lawandsocietymagazine.com/one-act-two-versions-and-now-no-appeal-the-supreme-courts-judgment-in-mene-ejegi-v-nba/> accessed 2 September 2026
Awodein K and Lateef MA, ‘So Called Conflicting Decisions of the Supreme Court: A Popular Mischaracterisation, the Uncertainty, and the Path to Reform’ (Law Pavilion Blog, 6 May 2025) <https://lawpavilion.com/blog/so-called-conflicting-decisions-of-the-supreme-court-a-popular-mischaracterisation-the-uncertainty-and-the-path-to-reform/> accessed 2 September 2026
Awodein K and Okoli I, ‘Harmonising Seeming Inconsistencies: A Critical Analysis of the Legal Practitioners Act, Cap L11, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 and the Legal Practitioners (Amendment) Decree No 21 of 1994’ (Law Pavilion Blog) <https://blog.lawpavilion.com/harmonising-seeming-inconsistencies-a-critical-analysis-of-the-legal-practitioners-act-cap-l11-laws-of-the-federation-of-nigeria-2004-and-the-legal-practitioners-amendment-decree-no-21-of-1994/> accessed 2 September 2026
‘Senate Passes Legal Practitioners, Proceeds of Crime Recovery Amendment Bills’ (Premium Times, 9 July 2026) <https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-news/894176-senate-passes-legal-practitioners-proceeds-of-crime-recovery-amendment-bills.html> accessed 2 September 2026
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