Lawyers in the country have begun a move to strip the Minister for Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami of his Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, title.
This is following Malami’s amendment to the rules of professional conduct for legal practitioners (RPC), 2007.
The AGF is said to have removed the requirement for the NBA stamp and seal on court processes.
The lawyers accused the Minister of taking the decision without proper consultation and creating room for non-lawyers to submit court processes.
The AGF took the decision barely a week after a splinter group known as the New NBA emerged from the Nigerian Bar Association.
The group had written a petition to Malami, asking his Ministry to recognise it as a decision making body of lawyers in the country.
The New NBA is mostly a group of aggrieved northern lawyers who were angered by Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s removal from the list of speakers in the 2020 NBA conference.
The lawyers are calling for Malami to be stripped of SAN in the petition started on Change.org by Izu Aniagu and titled “Sign to strip Nigeria’s AGF, Abubakar Malami the title of Senior Advocate of Nigeria.”
The petition added:
“Since his assumption of office as the Attorney-General of the Federation has continued to go rogue, from his disobedience to court order, to his lackluster prosecution, to his outright failure to prosecute, to allegations of corruption and bias against his person, to usurpation of office, to shielding of suspects, to his general dereliction of duty.