Professor Abdullahi Shehu Zuru is the former Dean, Faculty of Law at the Nile University in Abuja. In this interview, he speaks on the student loan regime, cost of legal education, and other issues bordering on legal development in Nigeria. Excerpts:
What do you make of the student loan regime introduced by the current government?
As someone who has had the opportunity of studying both in Nigeria and abroad, particularly where the student loan model was brought from, I think we need to thread carefully. All the talk about student loans being the rescue to the current travesty of our educational system should be viewed against the background of our peculiar circumstances.
In the UK where this has been operated for decades, it has succeeded but not absolutely. There are challenging areas of the students’ loan in the UK in which the government was able to recognize and attempted remedial policies. For instance, there have always been concerns about student indebtedness. This is because, as the coinage goes, it is a ‘loan’. We need to be careful adopting that in Nigeria because in the UK, it is easier because it is a credit society; the social setup has a kind of correlation with it. But if you think squarely, in terms of Nigeria’s peculiarities, I don’t think our social setup promotes credit social living.
Even in the UK, students would take the loan, but it becomes difficult to defray after graduating; that is even in the UK with the rate of unemployment at single digit, and there it attracts an interest.
I don’t know if the plans in Nigeria will also adopt the banking characteristics of attracting a meagre interest. That underscores my assertion that we need to be very careful, otherwise, we will end up like every other white elephant that comes with so much fanfare but ends up failing.
The focus of the loan is said to be the extremely poor families whose annual income is about N500,000?
Talking about the ‘poor’, in Nigeria, you don’t have the middle class, it is either you are rich or poor. I can bet you could safely say, beyond contestation, that 60 to 70 per cent of Nigerians are struggling to send their children to school. For those who have not even initiated sending their children to school, they are making 0 to 1 per cent income and having subsistence existence. How do you determine the N500,000 annual income in the general milieu of poverty? That is a hard call for me and a red flag for the policy. The government has to go back to the drawing board and determine who is poor as captured in the proposed template for the student loan; how well spread will that be? Will it be immune from political contamination as another side to the coin?
There are complaints about the rising cost of legal education in Nigeria as many graduates cannot go to the law school. What is your take?
Let’s start with the statistics of lawyers we have. We are still experiencing acute shortages in certain key sectors in our national life. One of those sectors is the legal sector. We are lacking the required number to keep the sector functional and very effective. That leads to the issue of why we have not been able to produce the number of lawyers that we need as a country?
Maybe, in recent decades we have observed an astronomical rise in the cost of legal education in the country. As someone who has operated and held leadership positions within that sector for a very long time, sadly, I had to admit that the cost of legal training in the country has gone beyond the reach of average income Nigerians. It has nothing to do with the aggregate intelligence or the level of IQ for you to enroll in the programme and make success of it. But the cost implication is what is dampening the zeal of the lawyers’ wannabes in the country.
As a dean, I had witnessed cases of graduates coming to talk to me in my office about what else for them because they had graduated from the faculty but their parents cannot afford to pay for the law school.
Three decades ago in northern Nigeria, the government came to the rescue of such funding hopelessness for graduates of law school. I am a beneficiary of such intervention where the government will pay or hugely subsidise the law education. Whether that has been sustained, I am not in a position to say.
The truth of the matter is that something has to be done, perhaps radically, to moderate the cost of legal education in the country to the level that both the rich and the average income Nigerians would have the opportunity to train their children to become lawyers. Not just law, other sectors including the medical sector are very expensive, and the ICT sector is becoming very expensive for an average income family in Nigeria to afford.
Maybe in the past, the soft landing had been the public sector universities. But with the current trajectory the government is adopting for the public sector to be given the latitude to determine the registration fees for public sector universities, I don’t think that is practicable any longer. And what is worrisome is actually the tremendous number of private universities that are coming on stream.
We need to be careful as a society not to allow the racist educational system to take hold in the country as it would spell doom. Because a situation where the children of the average income families can only access public sector universities, while the rich population of the country have exclusive access to private sector universities will not augur well for the country. It is discriminatory. Where it is allowed to be entrenched, we would lose the sanity of a level playing field amongst Nigerian university graduates. If that crystallizes into a serious factor in the employment market, that might spell even worse doom in the country.
What do you make of the quality of law graduates in Nigeria today?
As a product of a Nigerian university myself, I don’t doubt the quality of Nigerian graduates. If you weigh that in terms of courtroom brilliance, practice at the bar, in the academia, private sector industries, mine is an impression of intelligence, brilliance and astuteness. But that has to resonate with the university academics that we have.
These are, in most cases, thorough-bred academicians, driven by passion and a sense of patriotism and sacrifice that are toiling on a daily basis to produce the best for the legal industry. And I think they should be appreciated for that and the nation should hold them in high esteem with astounding gratitude.
If we spread the appraisal from the universities to the Nigerian Law School, I have no doubt in the quality that we are producing. Where the problem lies, perhaps, is the access for traineeship for law graduates and those of the Nigerian Law School. I think Nigeria, as a country, has not taken our time to develop a robust traineeship programme like the one in the UK. We sometimes produce lawyers desperate to develop their niche within the industry but unfortunately, there is just the much the industry can take.
Where do you stand on the controversy on parallel umbrella associations such as Law Society of Nigeria (LSN), Nigerian Law Society (NLS) similar to the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) at a time the Annual General Conference is around the corner?
I think we need to be very careful about what we wish for as lawyers. We have seen the serial balkanization of our judiciary institutions and we are still reeling from that; what I mean for instance, is the Nigerian Law School. The Nigerian Law School I attended was one and lawyers of my generation attended that same school in Lagos regardless of the part of the country you are coming from.
I think the problem with lawyers generally is that we like to express ourselves, sometimes beyond the boundaries of professional wisdom. Law society exists in the UK, in fact, the law schools are run within the ambit of the law society in the UK. I think legal practice has not developed to the level that you start talking about creating a parallel bar platform. The danger in that is that you may lose control.
The NBA is doing wonderfully well, and I must commend them for what they are doing in ensuring decorum and professional discipline among Nigerian lawyers. Now, if the urge for a law society is to create the latitude for possible legal advocacy or for the training of lawyers to become more competitive, you don’t need to create a parallel platform to that.
Anything that is divisive among professionals, particularly when it involves sundry or residual bodies, we need to tread very carefully. ASUU is still reeling from their own balkanization. There is a lesson in all that. I think what binds us together as lawyers is the NBA. It has micromanaged our bargaining position as lawyers, and I don’t think it has failed.
Do you think the perception that the Nigerian judiciary cannot be trusted to deliver justice given recent pronouncements is founded?
Who is saying that? If it is a politician, it is forgivable because this is someone who has a sense of coloured justice. Such antics directed at the judiciary should be rejected wholesome. Like in most sectors, the judiciary would require constant reforms to deliver on its mandate.