Legal Dilemmas

By Ayuk Kure One of the profound provisions of the Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners (RPC), 2007 is Rule 11 of the Rules. Rule 11 provides that “a lawyer who wishes to carry on practice as a legal practitioner shall participate in and satisfy the requirements of the Mandatory Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Programme operated by the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA)”. The province of this work does not extend to the question whether lawyers have been abiding by this provision nor whether the NBA has been living up to its responsibility in terms of enforcement and provision of a clear-cut regulation for the smooth operation of the programme but this work seeks to probe the connotations of the Rule on Continuing professional development. A careful perusal of Rule 11 will lead one to two inevitable conclusions. The first is that the legal training received by lawyers at the University and the law school levels is grossly inadequate to make them to...

By J. M. Jonathan Esq. Introduction The responsibility of conducting elections into the office of the President and Vice-President of Nigeria, Governor and Deputy Governor of a state, National Assembly of Nigeria and any other office to which a person may be elected under the constitution is vested in the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This is as stipulated in the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended and the extant Electoral Act. The power of the Commission to conduct these elections extends to fixing dates for the elections as well as determining the order in which the elections are to be conducted. On the other hand, the National Assembly in section 4 of the constitution is vested with the power to legislate for the peace, order and good governance of the Federation or any part thereof and for the purpose of specificity, the Constitution clearly spells out in the Exclusive Legislative list of Part I of the Second Schedule to the 1...