By Charles Ude, Esq
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A legal practitioner and author, Charles Ude, Esq., has published a paper arguing that the Bachelor of Laws programme in Nigeria should be reduced from five years to three, and that the Nigerian Law School’s teaching methods and faculty composition should be examined with the same seriousness now directed at failing candidates.
The paper, dated September 2026 and titled “A Fresh Case For Reducing The LL.B Programme From Five To Three Years: Addressing The Bar Finals Crisis And Aligning With Global Standards,” builds on the question raised by the immediate past NBA President, Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, at the 2026 NBA Legal Education Summit.
Ude opens by congratulating the new NBA President, Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, on her election as the 33rd President of the Association and the first woman ever elected to the office, secured with 12,317 votes in a three-way race. He records his gratitude to Osigwe, whose convening of the Summit and questioning of the five-year model, he writes, “planted the seed; we now water it.”
The Figures He Builds On
The paper rests on Bar Final results.
In the December 2025 Bar Final Examination, 1,067 out of 7,602 candidates failed, a pass rate of 79.1 per cent, down from 84 per cent the previous year. In the May 2026 resit, 983 of 1,955 candidates failed, a 50.3 per cent failure rate, up from 36.3 per cent in the 2025 resit.
He also breaks down the December 2025 distribution: 212 candidates, or 2.7 per cent, earned first-class honours, while 1,622 candidates, or 21.3 per cent, managed only a Pass and 314, or 4.1 per cent, received Conditional Pass grades.
“These are not just numbers on a page,” he writes. “These are thousands of young Nigerians who have spent five years in university, incurred significant financial burdens, and watched their dreams of joining the legal profession slip through their fingers.”
His conclusion from the distribution is blunt. “This distribution suggests that the five-year programme is not producing excellence, it is producing mediocrity at great cost.”
Duplication Between University And Law School
Ude adopts Osigwe’s observation that “keeping a person in a law faculty for five years will not improve the quality of legal education” and that some university courses are in reality subsumed under courses of practical relevance to legal practice.
“In other words, we are asking students to climb the same mountain twice,” he writes.
He argues that if five years of university legal education cannot adequately prepare a student for the Bar finals, the fault lies in the content and delivery of that education rather than in its duration.
The Accreditation Problem
The paper links the failure rates to what it calls the accreditation scandal in Nigerian law faculties.
It notes that in 2024 the Council of Legal Education suspended admissions into the law faculties of nine universities that had admitted and graduated students before obtaining accreditation, and that the number of approved law faculties has grown from four in the early 1960s to approximately 122 in 2026.
“This proliferation, without corresponding quality assurance, has degraded standards across the board,” he writes. “We are suffering from a crisis of quantity over quality.”
The Comparative Argument
Ude sets Nigeria against other jurisdictions.
The United Kingdom, from which Nigeria inherited its common law tradition, offers a three-year LL.B followed by professional training through the SQE or BPTC. Australia offers three to four years followed by practical legal training. Canada and the United States treat law as a graduate discipline, requiring a prior degree and three years of law school.
He gives particular weight to the University of Buckingham, which offers a two-year LL.B and whose Nigerian graduates have for years returned to qualify at the Nigerian Law School.
“If a Buckingham LL.B graduate can successfully navigate the Nigerian Law School after only two years of university legal education, what justification remains for insisting that Nigerian students spend five? The answer is simple: none.”
He also cites South Africa, where the undergraduate LL.B is under review because only 20 per cent of entrants complete it within four years and only about half of graduates enter the profession, with some universities discontinuing the undergraduate degree and others screening students for law admission in the second year.
Answering Odinkalu
The paper engages directly with the objection raised by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, that the comparison with the United Kingdom ignores differences in the quality of pre-university education.
Ude accepts the concern as valid but rejects the conclusion. “The solution is not to keep students in university for an extra two years to compensate for weaknesses in secondary education,” he writes. “A five-year programme that is poorly taught does not compensate for a weak foundation, it merely prolongs the problem.”
The Eight Core Subjects
The proposed three-year programme would be built around eight compulsory subjects: constitutional law, administrative law, criminal law, tort, contract, land law, equity and trusts, and the Nigerian legal system.
Ude traces the proposal to Osigwe and to the earlier work of Chima Umezuruike in “Reform of Legal Education and the Legal Profession in 21st Century Nigeria,” who argued that company law, commercial law and employment law are extensions of contract, equity, trust and tort, and that “a proper grounding in the core subjects will enable a lawyer to pick up these non-core subjects in practice.”
Umezuruike, he notes, also wrote that “nothing useful is achieved by forcing a student to study the LL.B for 5 years” and that two or three years should suffice.
The Cost Argument
The paper sets out the financial burden of the present model.
At private universities such as Nile University, law students pay approximately ₦4,550,000 per session, amounting to roughly ₦22.7 million over five years, excluding accommodation, textbooks and living expenses. Bar Part II at the Nigerian Law School currently costs ₦296,000 for Nigerians, before accommodation, dinners and other charges.
Reducing the duration by two years, Ude argues, would cut tuition, accommodation and associated costs substantially and could democratise access to a profession whose entry cost now excludes talented but poor students.
The Charge Against The Law School
The sharpest section of the paper turns from the universities to the Nigerian Law School.
“Let us be direct: a 50.3 per cent failure rate among resit candidates says as much about the teachers as it does about the taught,” Ude writes. “The Nigerian Law School has become a gatekeeping mechanism without being an educational institution in the true sense.”
He argues that in England a comparable decline in pass rates would prompt the Bar Standards Board or the Solicitors Regulation Authority to investigate the teaching institution and impose sanctions where teaching quality was found wanting, whereas in Nigeria the conversation has focused exclusively on student inadequacy.
Drawing on his own experience of the Legal Practice Course in England, where he says over 60 per cent of his tutors were practising solicitors and barristers, he contends that Nigerian Law School tutors are too often academics without practical experience in the profession they are preparing students to enter.
“You cannot learn to draft a contract by memorising the Sale of Goods Act. You cannot learn to cross-examine a witness by studying the Evidence Act,” he writes. “These skills are learned by doing.”
He notes that the Council of Legal Education last reviewed its curriculum in 2007, nearly two decades ago, and calls for the Bar Finals curriculum to cover legal technology and e-discovery, expanded alternative dispute resolution, legal project management, commercial awareness, digital forensics and cyber law, client communication, and wellness and ethics in practice.
The Twenty Recommendations
The paper closes with a twenty-point plan in three parts.
On the LL.B, it proposes a three-year programme effective from the 2027/2028 academic session, with foundational core subjects in year one, intermediate core subjects in year two and advanced study and skills development in year three; a curriculum restricted to the eight core subjects with electives only after core requirements; active teaching methods including moot courts and legal clinics; stricter entry requirements including aptitude tests and interviews; robust accreditation standards with a moratorium on new law faculties; and annual publication of Bar Finals performance data by university.
On the Law School, it proposes a target of at least 40 per cent of tutors being full-time practitioners with a minimum of five years’ experience; clinical teaching fellowships; biennial independent curriculum review; performance-based funding tied to student outcomes and employment rates; mandatory continuing professional development for tutors including annual placements in law firms; an independent panel to investigate teaching quality where failure rates spike, with power to recommend sanctions; and institutionalised student feedback.
On regulation, it proposes an annual legal education report from the Council of Legal Education, a standing reform committee drawing from the NBA, the Council, the Law School, universities and practitioners, international benchmarking, a support fund for indigent students, mental health and wellness programmes, and mandatory post-qualification practical training on the Scottish and Australian models.
The Statutory Route
Ude argues that no new legislation is required.
The Legal Education (Consolidation, etc.) Act, Cap L10, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004, he notes, established the Council of Legal Education and, by section 1(2), gives it responsibility for the legal education of persons seeking to become legal practitioners, which he says includes the power to review the duration and content of the LL.B.
“What is required is not a new law but the political will to exercise existing powers in the service of meaningful reform,” he writes.
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