Nigeria’s Legal System Needs Reform – Presidential Hopeful

The global legal architecture is not designed to deliver justice and Nigeria is no exception.

This is the view of Prince Adewole Adebayo, a presidential aspirant on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Speaking in Abuja recently, the lawyer turned politician maintain that expert lawyers’ practices have excluded many Nigerians who believe that justice is not for them and that such perception has been unconsciously created and sustained over time in the minds of the poor, who have concluded that legal fees are unaffordable and that law firms will not provide the legal representation they require.

According to him, “The challenge we have is that the mechanism for enforcing any of these manifestations of justice relies on the legal infrastructure and the legal infrastructure itself is a barricade because of the history of the world, relationship of a human being with land and with the property. And these are costs set up by those who are in charge of society and society itself is not just. And the legal system is set up to keep law and order while law and order is not even a cause of justice, they are not even from the same town.”

Prince Adebayo emphasized that Nigeria requires assistance and access to justice because many do not have access to justice and may eventually lose their sense of entitlement to justice.

He noted that in terms of philosophy, a country must define itself; foreign reserve gross national product, etc and all the other metrics by which a country must define itself relate to how justice is delivered and how just a society is.

Nigeria’s Country Representative, Ijeoma Nwafor, who led a team from the Hague Institute for Innovation, said the findings of her research expose the shortcomings of the Nigerian justice system.

Samuel Muller, the founding director of the Hague Institute for Innovation, said that they concluded that approximately 5.1 billion people, or two-thirds of the world’s population, do not have adequate access to justice.