By Victor Sunday
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- Introduction
There is an old scripture recorded in 1 Samuel 10:12 that asks almost in disbelief, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” The question was born of surprise of a man found doing what nobody expected of him. He wore a mantle that did not seem to fit the frame of his office and the same question is borrowed (not in mockery, though) in genuine inquiry because the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has once again stepped into a shoe it was not meant to wear. This time, it has told lawyers to stop charging their clients in foreign currencies and that those who persist may be prosecuted.
On Friday, 11 September 2026, a delegation of the Nigerian Bar Association’s Lagos Task Force on the Illegal Practice of Law, led by its head, paid a courtesy visit to the Acting Zonal Director of the EFCC’s Lagos Zonal Directorate Two. During the meeting, the Acting Zonal Director raised concerns over what he described as illegal and unethical practices among some legal practitioners, particularly the charging of professional fees in foreign currencies.
The EFCC subsequently formalized its position in a social media statement on Monday, 14 September 2026, declaring the practice illegal and unethical and warning that lawyers involved could face investigation and prosecution. The development appears to be an extension of the Commission’s broader campaign against the “dollarisation” of Nigeria’s domestic economy which was a campaign previously directed at sectors such as schools, supermarkets and hotels, and which has now reached the legal profession.
Nowhere in the reports and nowhere in the public statement itself is a specific statutory provision cited as the basis for this threatened prosecution. In a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law, an agency wielding the power to investigate and prosecute must be able to point to the exact section of the exact statute that it says has been breached. To threaten prosecution in the absence of a named offence is to govern by intimidation rather than by law and that is a dangerous habit for any agency charged with fighting crime to cultivate.
2.0. Could the EFCC be Right?
The EFCC might be banking on certain provisions of the law as authorities for its recent position. The most obvious is Section 20(5) of the Central Bank of Nigeria Act, 2007 which makes it an offence punishable by a fine or six months’ imprisonment for any person to refuse to accept the Naira as a means of payment and which empowers the Bank, by its proviso, to prescribe when other currencies may be used as a medium of exchange. That provision, on its plain wording, punishes REFUSAL (emphasis, mine) to accept the Naira from a party tendering it not the separate act of a professional and a willing client agreeing to price a service in dollars. The Central Bank has, on at least two occasions, in circulars of April and May 2015 both titled “Currency Substitution and Dollarisation of the Nigerian Economy,” attempted to stretch that same provision into a general prohibition on pricing goods and services in foreign currency, a reading that commentators at the time have criticized as going beyond what Section 20(5) actually says.
The second is the Foreign Exchange (Monitoring and Miscellaneous Provisions) Act. Read closely, that Act does not forbid the denomination of a private professional fee in foreign currency at all. Its Section 22 restricts cash payment whether in Naira or in foreign currency for the purchase of a specified list of high value items and otherwise directs that such payments be made by bank transfer while its Section 17 expressly permits any person to open and operate a domiciliary account and to receive and hold foreign currency without being obliged to disclose its source. Neither provision criminalizes a lawyer who is paid, by transfer into a domiciliary account, in the currency his client has agreed to pay him.
The third is Section 46 of the EFCC (Establishment) Act, 2004, which defines “economic crime” as conduct causing injury to the economy through unlawful means from which the Commission would have to show (not merely assert) that a particular fee arrangement was a scheme to injure the economy rather than an ordinary contract between consenting professional and client.
3.0. Who is Empowered to Regulate Professional Fees in Nigeria?
The regulation of legal practice in Nigeria falls squarely within the province of the Body of Benchers, the Nigerian Bar Association, and the disciplinary organs created under the Legal Practitioners Act,. Section 15 of the Legal Practitioners Act establishes the Legal Practitioners Remuneration Committee and vests in it, not in the EFCC, the power to make orders regulating what a lawyer may charge. This power it has been already exercised through the Legal Practitioners Remuneration Order 2023.
The Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners, 2023 made by the General Council of the Bar pursuant to Section 12(4) Legal Practitioners Act provides under Rule 48 that a lawyer’s fee must not be illegal, clearly excessive or in violation of the Remuneration Order and the same Rules now carry an entire chapter of anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing obligations for legal practitioners made in recognition of the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022 under which lawyers are already registered with the Commission’s own Special Control Unit Against Money Laundering as designated non-financial businesses and professions.
Where a lawyer’s fee arrangement offends professional ethics, the remedy lies in a petition to the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee, not in a criminal dragnet cast by an anti-graft agency and the Supreme Court settled the primacy of that channel as far back as Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee v. Fawehinmi (1985) 2 NWLR (Pt. 7) 300 holding the Committee to be a tribunal properly seized of matters touching a lawyer’s professional conduct, a holding the Court of Appeal reinforced thirty years later in Chief Andrew Oru v. Nigerian Bar Association & 2 Others (2015) LPELR-24813(CA) where the Federal High Court itself declined jurisdiction over a dispute it found to be a matter of legal practice and discipline.
The EFCC’s own statutory mandate concerns economic and financial crimes, principally money laundering, advance fee fraud, and related offences under its enabling Act and the Money Laundering Act already mentioned. Pricing a professional service in a foreign currency alone is not one of the offences those statutes were written to catch and where the Commission already possesses a lawful AML channel through SCUML registration for scrutinizing a lawyer’s financial dealings, it has little need to manufacture a new offence out of the currency on the invoice. If the Commission believes that foreign currency invoicing by lawyers is a device for concealing proceeds of crime or evading tax, that is a claim it must investigate and prove case by case not a blanket pronouncement issued against an entire profession on the strength of a courtesy visit thereby acting as the legislative arm of government. Is the EFCC also among the prophets, possessing legislative powers of prophetic dimensions?
4.0. Why Are Lawyers Always Profiled by the EFCC?
It is also worth asking why of all the sectors of the Nigerian economy where foreign currency pricing quietly persists from luxury real estate to private schooling to certain import dependent trades, the legal profession keeps finding itself singled out for special attention. This is not the Commission’s first pointed remark about lawyers and their fees. Less than two years ago, its Chairman spoke publicly of what he termed obscene legal fees paid to senior advocates by political office holders and accused sections of the profession of aiding the very financial crimes the Commission was established to fight, an allegation the Bar’s national leadership rejected and threatened to challenge in court. Now, a pattern begins to emerge in which the profession most equipped to hold power accountable through the courts is also the profession most frequently placed under public suspicion by the very agency whose conduct that profession is often called upon to scrutinize.
Many Nigerian lawyers, particularly those who advise multinational clients, structure cross border transactions or defend against parties who themselves invoice in foreign currency, price their services in dollars because the naira’s volatility makes naira denominated fees an economically irrational proposition. A lawyer who drafts a transaction document tied to an offshore financing arrangement is not evading the law by asking to be paid in the currency in which the underlying deal itself is struck. To criminalize this without distinguishing it from genuine illicit conduct is to punish a rational commercial response to macroeconomic instability as though it were smuggling.
None of this is an argument against the Commission’s existence or its general competence to fight financial crime. That question was settled long ago. In Attorney General of Ondo State v. Attorney General of the Federation & Others (2002) 9 NWLR (Pt. 772) 222, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the National Assembly’s anti-corruption legislation as a proper exercise of its treaty implementation power. This was a holding on which the EFCC’s own establishment has since rested and which the apex court has had no cause to disturb, most recently when it dismissed a coalition of state governments’ challenge to the powers of the EFCC, the ICPC, and the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit over the management of public funds and again in Attorney General of Abia State v. Attorney General of the Federation (2024) LPELR 62576 (SC) where the Court considered and rejected an attempt to place a state government’s accounts beyond the Commission’s reach entirely. What those decisions confirm is that the Commission’s authority to investigate and prosecute economic and financial crime is broad and well settled. What they do not confirm and what no decision of any Nigerian court has yet confirmed is that the Commission may extend that same authority into the currency in which a private professional fee is denominated, a subject on which, as the statutes canvassed above show, the written law simply does not follow it. A power upheld for one purpose is not a license for every purpose a Commission might (in a moment of zeal) decide to attach to it.
5.0. A Note of Caution
That said, professional fee practices should not sit beyond scrutiny altogether. Where a lawyer structures fees to launder proceeds of crime or disguises or assists a client in evading foreign exchange control laws that genuinely apply to the transaction in question, the law should reach that lawyer and the Commission has every right to pursue it. However, the case of Federal Republic of Nigeria v. Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN) [2021] 9 N.W.L.R. Pt. 1782 at 452 is particularly instructive where the Court of Appeal ruled that a legal practitioner is entitled to their professional fees and is not legally required to investigate the source of funds paid by a client. The Nigerian Bar Association’s own task force appears to have urged the Commission to route complaints about professional misconduct through the Bar’s disciplinary machinery rather than through criminal threat which is a reminder that the structure for policing lawyers already exists and does not need reinvention by an agency reaching beyond its brief.
So we return to the question with which we began. Is the EFCC among the prophets newly ordained to pronounce on professional ethics, fee structuring and the internal governance of the Bar? Or is this rather the familiar spectacle of an agency, however well-intentioned in its stated aim of curbing dollarisation, stretching its statutory garment over a body it was never measured to fit? A nation that wishes to be governed by law and not by the loudest threat deserves an answer grounded in a named statute and a demonstrated case not a warning issued in a room. Until that answer comes, the question remains fair, and it remains open, “Is the EFCC also among the prophets?”
Victor Sunday is a legal writer, researcher, orator and public affairs analyst. He can be reached at victorsundayonwukwe@gmail.com
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Authored by Ben Ijeoma Adigwe Esq., ACIarb (UK), LL.M, Dip. in Artificial Intelligence, Director at the Delta State Ministry of Justice, Asaba, Nigeria.
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