By Folarinwa M. Aluko
“A father who does not know the number of his children will one day call his household a crowd.” African Proverb
For months now, public discourse has circled around a familiar refrain: that Nigeria has “too many lawyers.” It is a claim that resurfaces with each Call to Bar ceremony; a lament about oversupply, about universities churning out graduates faster than the profession can absorb them.
Beneath that surface anxiety, however, lies a more unsettling reality. Nigeria’s problem is not one of abundance but of absence: of inaccessible justice, of unresponsive structures, and of a legal profession trapped between obsolescence and opportunity.
The Mirage of Oversupply
If one were to believe the rhetoric, Nigeria’s legal profession is teeming beyond capacity; no vacancy, come tomorrow. The numbers, however, tell a different story. From my personal investigations, as at 1999, there were roughly 30,000 names on the Supreme Court roll of lawyers called to the Nigerian Bar. By 2009, that figure had risen to about 71,000. Today, including, the retired, the emigrated, the dead and the disbarred, the number barely falls shy of 200,000.
In the absence of any actual metrics, a closer and truer measure lies in those who pay their Bar Practicing Fees on or before March 31 each year, a number that has plateaued in recent years around 70,000 lawyers. In a nation of more than 200 million, this translates to one lawyer for about 2,850 Nigerians, less than one-third the ratio in South Africa and a fraction of that in the United Kingdom or the United States.
When viewed against the backdrop of more than 3.1 million registered businesses, limited liability companies, and an ever-expanding informal economy, that ratio underscores how thinly the Legal Profession is spread across a population and marketplace that depend daily on contracts, compliance, and rights protection.
The imbalance, then, is not of too many lawyers but of too few lawyers where they are needed most. Many lawyers are disengaged, disillusioned, or disconnected from both the National and Branch circuits of the Nigerian Bar Association.
This imbalance is both geographic and structural. Lawyers are concentrated in State Capitals, major towns and City Centers; Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kano, Jos, Ibadan, Enugu with a handful scattered across the remaining thirty-three states. The geographic saturation is further compounded by the profession’s narrow practice horizons: corporate, litigation, and land law dominate, while Energy, Immigration, Policy, Environmental, and Technology Law among other new areas, remain largely uncharted.
The market principle is straightforward. When supply is limited and concentrated, cost rises and access shrinks. Justice, in turn, becomes a luxury commodity. It is not an oversupply of lawyers that burdens Nigeria’s legal system. It is an oversaturation of sameness, too many lawyers doing the same kind of work, in the same kinds of places, for the same kinds of clients.
The cost of this sameness extends beyond the courts. The private sector, too, suffers from the absence of industry-grounded legal expertise. Nigeria’s oil and gas, manufacturing, and telecommunications sectors operate under labyrinthine regulations with little consistent legal interpretation or advocacy. Without lawyers who understand the industries they serve, compliance becomes confusion, and innovation becomes risk. The result is a private sector that spends more time navigating uncertainty than creating value.
Law Practice: Doing Business with an Outdated Model
The deeper crisis lies not in the size of the Bar but in its architecture. Nigeria’s legal profession is bound to a business model that belongs to another century. Law firms are required to operate only as sole proprietorships or partnerships; they cannot raise capital through equity or public listing.
Their only legitimate financing comes from debt or client revenue, both unreliable sources in an economy where the cost of money is among the highest in Africa. Commercial lending rates routinely exceed 25%, credit is short-tenored, and even asset-backed borrowing attracts punitive conditions. For small or mid-tier law firms, this makes scaling virtually impossible.
While other professional industries such as accounting, consulting, and architecture have evolved through incorporation, mergers and venture funding, the Nigerian legal industry remains chained to personal liability and thin margins. Banks consider law firms unbankable because they own no tangible assets beyond libraries, goodwill and trust. Investors cannot buy into them, and the tax code treats them as Proprietors, granting none of the reliefs or incentives that would enable scalable investment in human capital or technology.
This structural fragility reverberates across the economy. The inability of the legal profession to mobilize capital limits its capacity to support the private sector, which depends on sound legal structuring to attract investment, manage risk, and negotiate fair regulation.
Every industry that aspires to scale, Finance, Energy, Technology, Agriculture, needs lawyers who understand both the letter of the law and the logic of the market. When that bridge collapses, regulation fills the vacuum, and over-regulation becomes a substitute for governance.
The cumulative effect is a profession permanently under-capitalized, unable to modernize, and anxious about its future. Yet, when lawyers call for reform, the institutional instinct has been to legislate remuneration, to fix minimum fees as if prosperity were a matter of decree.
Markets however, do not respond to proclamations. Price follows value, which follows demand. When supply is unevenly distributed and structurally constrained, fixing the price only amplifies distortion. The medical sector’s experience with wage controls and recurrent strikes stands as a cautionary tale: price floors protect appearance, not stability.
Are Lawyers the Problem?
The accusation that lawyers are bottlenecks to progress has found a new audience National Policymakers. Nigeria’s poor showing in the Ease of Doing Business index has been repeatedly linked to “legal delays.”
In the World Bank’s last report, Nigeria ranked 131st of 190 economies in enforcing contracts. The subtext, often whispered in bureaucratic corridors, is that lawyers, with their procedures, paperwork, and insistence on legality, are the problem.
But that logic is profoundly flawed. It turns Defenders of the rule of law into scapegoats for administrative inefficiency. A government that views lawyers as obstacles rather than guarantors of order risks confusing governance with convenience.
Without Lawyers, Nigeria’s regulatory agencies will expand and overreach until Private Enterprise suffocates under the weight of compliance.
That tendency now finds expression in the State’s bandwagon approach to artificial intelligence. Some agencies have begun deploying AI tools to offer “legal guidance,” from drafting contracts to interpreting regulations, without the disclaimers that such advice is not a substitute for Counsel.
In a country where citizens already hesitate to consult lawyers, this unregulated automation deepens the divide between people and professional protection. It is not efficiency; it is quiet disenfranchisement, a subtle separation of citizens from those trained to defend their rights.
The Lawyer Deficit in a Nation of Injustice
If lawyers are indeed Nigeria’s problem, then who will solve it? The prisons remain overcrowded with pre-trial detainees. Law Enforcement Agencies with droll acronyms now act as Debt Collectors, re-casting civil disputes as criminal complaints to intimidate, infringe and trample on civil liberties as Executive overreach persists unchallenged.
Access to justice remains the truest measure of a functioning democracy, and Nigeria consistently fails to measure up.
According to the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL), 81% of Nigerians experience at least one serious legal problem every year, yet most never obtain resolution.
In such a nation, the notion that there are “too many lawyers” borders on satire. There are not enough lawyers where justice is needed most.
The same deficit echoes in commerce. Entrepreneurs and investors face unclear rules, shifting compliance regimes, and conflicting directives from overlapping agencies. In every mature economy, Business Lawyers help define the limits of regulation and defend the space for Enterprise. Nigeria’s shortage of such Practitioners leaves the private sector exposed, and the economy weaker for it.
Rethinking the Profession
A profession that does not know its members cannot complain that it has too many. Fixing Nigeria’s lawyer problem begins with knowing what it is. The challenge is not numerical but structural. Before we can distribute justice, we must count its custodians. Whether for continuing legal education, remuneration guidelines, or policy reform, no useful decision can be made in the absence of accurate data.
To their credit, the administrations of NBA Presidents, Olu Akpata and Yakubu Maikyau, SAN, laid the groundwork for a lawyer census, leveraging technology to track membership and active practice. Without such empirical grounding, the profession is navigating blind.
To reclaim relevance, the Bar must look outward as well as inward. The Nigerian economy is diversifying faster than its lawyers. New frontiers of law are developing faster than the institutions meant to regulate them. The profession needs to produce courtroom advocates and industry interpreters, lawyers fluent in the language of policy, finance, and innovation.
The Bar must also fight the African culture of gatekeeping. Efforts to keep practice areas small, to reserve emerging fields for the few, have left entire sectors underdeveloped. Emerging areas such as Arbitration, Mediation, Intellectual Property, Fintech and so on, should be growth corridors, not guarded estates. I have seen this firsthand. When entrenched interests sought to fence off intellectual property practice, the Intellectual Property Lawyers Association Nigeria challenged that monopoly and broke it, opening the field to new practitioners and ideas.
The Real Diagnosis
Nigeria does not suffer from an excess of lawyers; it suffers from a shortage of justice. The profession’s crisis is not one of population but of imagination, a failure to evolve its business structures, harness its human capital, and assert its indispensability in a society tempted to automate or ignore it.
If Nigeria truly wishes to prosper, it must see Lawyers not as barriers to reform but as its instruments, not as burdens on the economy but as bridges between Law, Enterprise, and Liberty. Until then, the nation will continue to mistake its symptoms for its sickness and call it a Lawyer problem when, in truth, it is a justice problem.
I will end with the words of the late Christopher Sapara Williams:
“A lawyer lives for the direction of his [/her] people and the advancement of the cause of his [/her] country.”
Folarinwa M. Aluko is a legal practitioner and Partner in the Law Firm of Trumann Rockwood Solicitors. He can be reached at 08038601052 or by email at fmaluko@trumann-rockwood.com
