At what point does punishment cease to be a deterrent and become merely the cost of doing business? This is the uncomfortable question raised by the growing reports of persons impersonating legal practitioners in Nigeria.
A person spends years becoming a lawyer. Another simply pretends to be one, secures a multi-million-naira brief, pays a genuine lawyer to do the actual legal work and, when eventually caught, faces a penalty that may be only a fraction of what was earned.
A recent case involving John Nwawuto Anoruo is particularly striking. Reports indicate that he obtained a legal brief worth ₦7.5 million, paid ₦1.5 million to a genuine lawyer to handle the matter, and was eventually convicted for impersonation and the use of a counterfeit NBA seal. He was reportedly fined a total of ₦270,000 by the Lagos State High Court sitting in Ikeja. The figures alone should make us pause. The fine represents only about 3.6% of the ₦7.5 million reportedly received. But the disparity raises a legitimate question: Does the law make the financial reward of impersonating a legal practitioner outweigh the potential risk?.
An outdated penalty for a modern crime
Section 22 of the Legal Practitioners Act criminalises, among other things, practising or holding oneself out as a legal practitioner without being entitled to do so. Yet the monetary penalty prescribed for the core offence is a fine of not more than ₦200, imprisonment for up to two years, or both. A ₦200 fine is plainly disconnected from an economy where a single legal brief can be worth millions of naira.
Reports indicate that in 2016, a Magistrate Court in Ilorin Kwara State, sentenced one Itopa Peter Adogun to 10 month’s imprisonment with an option of ₦10,000 fine for fraudulently practising as a lawyer. In 2022 a fake lawyer identified as Emmanuel Adekola was sentenced to 12 months in prison. However, Section 17 of the Medical and Dental Practitioners Act impose: a summary conviction to a fine not exceeding N5,000.00, conviction or indictment, to a fine not exceeding N10,000.00 or imprisonment, for a term not exceeding five years or to both such fine and imprisonment. The Legal Practitioners Legislation penalty is quite significantly lower than the Medical Legislation. The financial penalty value of the professional services and the huge financial rewards that an imposter gains are vastly different.
The solution lies in a comprehensive review of the Legal Practitioner’s Act, the imposition of a fine or imprisonment not exceeding two years may not constitute an adequate deterrence. The law should be reviewed to provide for imprisonment for a minimum of three years and not exceeding 7 years with no option of fine. There should be a unique verifiable NBA seal linked to the NBA’s official database, where individuals and other institutions are able to verify the lawyer’s identity and practicing status. Furthermore, the verification of a lawyer should not depend solely on a lawyer’s robe. Every practicing advocate appearing before a court should be verified by the court registrar’s or designated court official before being permitted to address the court. The legal profession should be a tight culture among its members that it is easy to pick out impersonators amongst the profession. Such a system would strengthen accountability and enhance confidence in the legal profession.
The real measure of an effective deterrent is whether the person contemplating the offence looks at the consequences and thinks: “This is simply not worth it.” And perhaps that is the question the Nigeria Bar Association and the legal profession should now be asking: “Have we made fake legal practice sufficiently difficult, sufficiently detectable and sufficiently costly to make it a bad business decision?”
If the answer is no, then we are not merely dealing with fake lawyers. We are dealing with a legal framework that may be failing to deter a profitable form of professional impersonation.