*Warns Public Education Too Broken For Shorter Law Degree
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Renowned human rights scholar and former Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Prof. Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, CGoF, has challenged the proposal by NBA President Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, to reduce the duration of the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) programme in Nigeria from five years to three years, arguing that the comparison with the United Kingdom, where law is studied for three years, is fundamentally flawed because it ignores the vast difference in the quality of pre-university education between the two countries.
In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Odinkalu stated that the NBA “has this one upside-down and has a lot more work to do to sort out its reasoning and proposals, if it has any,” delivering one of the sharpest public critiques of the legal education reform agenda that Osigwe unveiled at the 2026 NBA Legal Education Summit in Abuja.
Odinkalu’s central argument is that the comparison between Nigeria’s five-year LLB and the UK’s three-year law degree is misleading because the two systems operate on fundamentally different educational foundations.
In the United Kingdom, students must complete an A-Level programme or International Baccalaureate before gaining admission to read law at university. These pre-university programmes take two years of what Odinkalu described as “exacting study,” during which students develop advanced analytical, writing, and reasoning skills that prepare them for the rigours of university-level legal education.
“Law is a three-year programme in the UK because you need an A-Level or International Baccalaureate to get in. Those programmes take two years of exacting study. If you add that to three years, that gives you five years,” Odinkalu explained.
The implication is that the UK’s three-year law degree is actually a five-year educational journey when the mandatory pre-university qualification is factored in. The three-year degree works in the UK precisely because the two years of intensive pre-university preparation have already equipped students with the foundational skills that Nigerian universities must spend additional years developing.
“The student leaving an A-Level programme in the UK is in most cases more complete than our LLB after five years in Nigeria,” Odinkalu stated, a comparison that amounts to a damning indictment of the quality of both secondary and tertiary education in Nigeria.
Odinkalu framed his critique within the broader context of Nigeria’s collapsed public education system, suggesting that the NBA’s focus on reducing the length of the LLB programme misses the more fundamental problem.
“In a country in which public education is destroyed and many new entrants into the Nigerian Bar Association are unable to conjugate the verb ‘to be,’ we have more fundamental issues,” Odinkalu stated.
The observation that new entrants to the Bar cannot conjugate basic English verbs strikes at the heart of the quality debate. If law graduates who have completed five years of university education and a further year at the Nigerian Law School still lack basic grammatical competence, the solution is not to shorten the training period but to address the systemic failures in primary, secondary, and tertiary education that produce such outcomes.
Odinkalu’s argument suggests that reducing the LLB from five years to three years in the current Nigerian educational context would not produce the kind of “practical and focused” graduates that Osigwe envisions, but would instead release even less prepared lawyers into a profession that is already struggling with quality concerns.
At the 2026 NBA Legal Education Summit, Osigwe called for a comprehensive reform of Nigeria’s legal education system, including the reduction of the LLB programme’s duration. He argued that “the practical and focused content of university education will achieve better results even if it lasts for three years.”
Osigwe drew support for his position from the work of legal scholar Chimamizulike Urukesei, who had argued in a published article that the five-year LLB duration is unnecessarily long and that only core subjects should be compulsory for eligibility to sit the Bar examinations.
According to Urukesei’s analysis, which Osigwe cited approvingly, the core subjects that should form the basis of a shortened LLB programme are Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Tort, Contract, Land Law, Equity and Trust, and the Nigerian Legal System. Other subjects, including Jurisprudence, which is not a core subject in England, could be left to individual universities to determine.
Osigwe also argued that a shorter programme would provide economic relief for students, noting that “reducing the length of the LLB programme will help poor students” who are increasingly finding it difficult to pay law school fees while bearing the financial burden of clothing, feeding, shelter, and other mandatory requirements.
The NBA President further suggested that Nigeria may eventually need to abandon the compulsory in-campus Nigerian Law School model entirely due to rising costs and increasing admission pressure, and that the system should move away from rote learning toward practical, problem-solving, and student-participation models.
The core of Odinkalu’s critique is the gap between the educational foundation that makes a three-year law degree viable in the UK and the educational reality in Nigeria.
In the UK, a student entering a law faculty has typically completed 13 years of structured education: six years of primary school, five years of secondary school, and two years of A-Levels or equivalent. By the time they begin their law degree, they possess advanced reading comprehension, critical analysis, essay writing, and independent research skills that have been rigorously tested through national examinations.
In Nigeria, a student entering a law faculty has typically completed six years of primary school and six years of secondary school, but the quality of that education varies enormously, and many students arrive at university with significant gaps in basic literacy, analytical reasoning, and academic writing skills. Nigerian universities must therefore dedicate a portion of the LLB programme to building foundational skills that UK students acquired before university.
Reducing the Nigerian LLB to three years without first addressing the quality of pre-university education would mean removing two years of instruction without replacing the foundational skill-building that those years currently provide, however imperfectly.
Odinkalu’s concluding assessment was blunt: the NBA needs to do significantly more work on its legal education reform proposals before they can be taken seriously as policy.
“I think, most respectfully, the NBA has this one upside-down and has a lot more work to do to sort out its reasoning and proposals, if it has any,” Odinkalu stated.
The phrase “if it has any” suggests that Odinkalu views the NBA’s current reform agenda as more aspiration than concrete policy, lacking the detailed analysis, empirical foundation, and practical implementation framework that would be needed to justify a change as significant as halving the duration of the law degree.
Odinkalu’s critique adds to an already contentious debate that emerged from the NBA Legal Education Summit, where Vice Chancellor of Imo State University Prof. Uchefula Chukwumaeze, SAN, called for the outright abolition of the Nigerian Law School, and Law School Director-General Dr Titilayo Odusote dismissed that recommendation as “out of place.”
The legal education reform debate now features at least three distinct positions. The first, represented by Osigwe, advocates for a shorter LLB, revised curriculum, expanded clinical education, and possible abandonment of the Law School model. The second, represented by Chukwumaeze, goes further and calls for abolishing the Law School entirely and transferring all training to universities in a seven-year programme. The third, represented by Odinkalu, argues that the reform conversation is premature until the more fundamental crisis in primary and secondary education is addressed, since the quality of lawyers cannot exceed the quality of the educational foundation upon which their training is built.
The tension between these positions reflects a deeper disagreement about where the problem lies. If the problem is the length and structure of legal training, then curriculum reform and programme shortening may be the answer. If the problem is the quality of students entering law faculties, then no amount of curricular reform at the university level will solve what is fundamentally a failure of basic education.
As Odinkalu framed it, a country where new lawyers cannot conjugate basic verbs does not have a law school problem or a curriculum length problem. It has an education system problem. And until that is addressed, shortening the LLB from five years to three will only produce lawyers who are less prepared in less time, not the “practical and focused” graduates the NBA President envisions.
Neither NBA President Osigwe nor any representative of the NBA has publicly responded to Odinkalu’s critique as at the time of this report.
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