A few days ago, colleagues and friends, notably J.S. Okutepa SAN and Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, bemoaned the role lawyers play in the ruination of our country. Okutepa, in particular, took aim at the vanities and excesses of senior advocates whose conduct steadily erodes confidence in the very rank that ought to ennoble them. My good friend, Oby Ezekwesili, added her voice at the ongoing NBA Conference in Enugu, where she charged lawyers to stand against prebendalism and defend the moral foundations of our country. Their concerns are grave. Their warnings are urgent. But I think, with respect, that they adorn lawyers with borrowed robes. They expect salvation from a class whose history shows it has been the foremost agent of oppression.
The philosopher, Karl Marx, was unsparing in his judgment. To him, lawyers were not neutral actors but indispensable instruments of the ruling class. They wrote the contracts that dispossessed peasants, defended the monopolies of the bourgeoisie, and clothed naked greed with the false dignity of legal order. For him, law was never about justice; it was a superstructure designed to protect property and power. And lawyers? They were its priests, administering rituals of oppression with Latin phrases and wigs, much like the puissant lawyers of Elizabethan England, who were more concerned with maintaining class hierarchies than delivering justice. It is this class of lawyers that embodies the Nigerian era today.
History is littered with examples. Adolf Hitler, the failed painter turned tyrant, understood better than most the role of lawyers in entrenching authoritarianism. “I need lawyers, not laws”, he once famously quipped. It was not an idle remark. Hitler saw in lawyers a pliable class, ready to twist the law into grotesque forms that legitimised persecution, dispossession, and genocide. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, drafted and defended by German lawyers, stripped Jews of citizenship and dignity. Here, lawyers did not merely follow orders; they manufactured the legal architecture of evil. Compare this to Charles Dickens’ famous quip: “The law is an ass”. Dickens, writing in the 19th century, was venting at the absurdities and inefficiencies of English legal procedure. The donkey was stubborn, foolish, laughable. But Hitler’s quip takes Dickens’ cynicism to a darker depth. For Dickens, law was a joke; for Hitler, law was a weapon, and lawyers were its willing executioners. Between the two statements lies the tragedy of the modern legal profession: from farce to horror, lawyers remain central to both.
The United States offers more grim examples. In the antebellum South, lawyers drafted slave codes that defined human beings as chattel. They litigated fugitive slave cases, sending escaped men and women back into chains. The infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, authored by Chief Justice Roger Taney, declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. That judgment was not only the work of a judge; it was the logical product of generations of lawyers who had legitimised slavery through contracts, wills, mortgages, and statutes. Even after slavery fell, Jim Crow arose, and once again, lawyers were at the vanguard. They crafted “separate but equal” laws, defended lynch mobs in court, and elevated segregation into a constitutional doctrine through Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Entire law schools in the South trained students not in justice but in the jurisprudence of white supremacy. The robes may have been black, but the ink they spilt was red with blood, as was the law which dripped with the blood of black slaves.
Why do I revisit history? Because it reminds us that the Nigerian Bar cannot claim innocence. Our lawyers have long served power, not people. Colonial barristers lent legitimacy to indirect rule, codifying ordinances that dispossessed communities of their land. In today’s postcolonial Nigeria, lawyers draft the contracts that sell off our commonwealth to prebendal elites. They defend election riggers in court with the same zeal they defend oil companies that spill and pollute the Niger Delta. They launder stolen wealth with affidavits and opinions, turning plunder into property. If Marx were alive, he would not be surprised. He would say: lawyers are merely doing what they have always done. This is the point Oby Ezekwesili presses upon: that lawyers must choose differently. In Enugu, she challenged lawyers to stand against prebendalism, the Nigerian curse whereby public office is reduced to personal property and the state is stripped to feed patronage networks. But here lies the tension: how can we expect the legal profession, itself a prebendal estate, to defend citizens against prebendalism?
Are we not expecting the vulture to guard the carcass?
However, there is hope. Not all lawyers have been mere agents of oppression. History records those who broke ranks with the ruling class and sided with the oppressed; and also records those who pretentiously sided with the oppressed, only to join up with the exploiter class. There are few on parade today in Nigeria. You know them. In the United States, the NAACP’s legal team, led by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, utilised the courts to dismantle Jim Crow laws, case by case, until segregation was ultimately overturned by the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In apartheid South Africa, lawyers like Bram Fischer defended Mandela and the Rivonia trialists, risking their own liberty in the process. In Nigeria, Gani Fawehinmi and Kanmi Ishola-Osobu stood as thorns in the flesh of dictators, using the law as a shield for the powerless. These were lawyers of conscience, willing to subvert the profession’s complicity for the sake of justice.
The truth is stark: every society faces the choice about what kind of lawyer it produces. Hitler’s Germany produced lawyers who turned the law into a blade. Jim Crow America produced lawyers who polished chains. However, history also shows that societies have produced lawyers who dismantle oppression and bend the law towards liberation. Nigeria stands at this crossroads. Our courts groan under corruption, our politics is debased by prebendalism, and our people are weary of a profession that seems more interested in silk gowns than in justice.
So, when Okutepa, Odinkalu, and Ezekwesili challenge lawyers to do better, they are asking not for utopia but for courage. They are asking lawyers to shed the borrowed robes of power and wear instead the garments of conscience. To remember that the prestige of Senior Advocates means nothing if it rests on the ruins of a broken society. To recall that Latin maxims cannot clothe the naked poor, and that technical victories for thieves only deepen the despair of citizens. The lesson of history is clear: lawyers can either be midwives of justice or undertakers of freedom. They can be Dickens’ “ass”, bumbling and absurd, or Hitler’s “lawyers without laws”, cunning and cruel. But they can also be Fawehinmi’s warriors, wielding the law not as an instrument of oppression but as a tool of emancipation.
The choice is ours.
Today, Nigeria needs more than lawyers who recite statutes; it needs lawyers who challenge power. It needs more than advocates in silk; it needs advocates for the streets, for the workers, for the oppressed. If the Bar is to reclaim its soul, it must declare its allegiance not to prebendal elites but to the people whose cries echo in our courtrooms. For too long, Nigerian lawyers have mistaken their duty as service to the state or service to the rich. However, the true duty of law is to serve justice. And justice, as history shows, is rarely found in the palaces of power. It is found in the cries of the traders in Onitsha market, exploited by NAFDAC officials, in the anguish of the pensioner denied his dues, and in the despair of unemployed graduates turned beggars at traffic lights.
To serve justice, Nigerian lawyers must descend from their high horses and walk among our people. Marx was right: lawyers have often been the handmaidens of oppression. But history also shows another possibility. The challenge to the Nigerian Bar is simple: will you be Hitler’s lawyer or Fawehinmi’s warrior? Will you side with the prebendal class or with the oppressed masses? The answer will determine whether our law remains a chain or becomes a key. The time has come for lawyers of conscience to make a choice. And they must choose the side of workers and the oppressed.
But, will they?
**Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja**
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