Nigeria has never been short of lawyers. The country produces them in battalions, armed with wigs, gowns, and a fondness for quoting obscure Latin phrases that leave fellow citizens scratching their heads. What Nigeria has lacked, however, are lawyers who can save a road before it crumbles; or, rescue a power plant before it fails. That is the gap that Dr. Adebowale Adedokun, Director-General of the Bureau of Public Procurement, wants to close.
To him, the nation’s infrastructure deficit is not just a funding shortfall. It is, more fundamentally, a deficit of contracts. Recently in Enugu, at the Nigerian Bar Association’s 65th annual general conference, he told an audience of attorneys that Nigeria’s missing bridges and broken hospitals are as much the fault of legal drafting as they are of limited budgets. “For any contract or any construction that you sign off on that does not yield end-user satisfaction,” he declared, “that agreement that you drafted is questionable.”
The remedy, in his opinion backed by decades in the procurement sector, is to create a new professional species: the specialised procurement lawyer. In his Enugu presentation, three whole slides were devoted to their proposed role. He was not lobbying gently. “Can we create procurement lawyers? Lawyers that are focused purely on procurement-related issues?” he demanded.
There are models abroad. “I was in a country recently; they have procurement lawyers that focus on IT alone. All IT contracts there are lawyers, that is their job,” he explained. At home, however, “very few lawyers today know about standard bidding documents that govern procurement in Nigeria. Very few.”
To be clear, this is not about producing clerks who shuffle papers more quickly. The vision is for lawyers embedded at every stage of the procurement chain: screening eligibility, drafting contracts, managing risk, enforcing compliance with the Public Procurement Act of 2007, and acting as sentinels against corruption. As Dr Adebowale put it, they should “curb corruption by exposing irregularities, be on the side of justice for the citizens who are in dire need of social amenities.”
The urgency is underscored by history. The notorious Process and Industrial Developments (P&ID) arbitration, which almost saddled Nigeria with an eleven-billion-dollar bill, remains a cautionary tale. Had procurement lawyering been sharper, the contract itself might never have reached the stage where it became a noose around the nation’s neck.
The question is not whether Nigeria needs more lawyers. It already has more than one hundred thousand on its rolls. The question is whether those lawyers can become deep specialists, able to master the intricacies of billion-dollar procurement projects rather than skating across the surface of general practice. As Dr Adebowale said plainly, “We need lawyers to be professional in different sectors of our economy. That is my challenge to you.”
His argument dovetails neatly into the procurement reforms being rolled out under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda. Over seventy per cent of public investment flows through procurement. The Bureau has introduced an e-procurement system, a Nigeria E-Market, revised bidding documents, and a debarment policy to blacklist erring contractors. Each of these demands legal interpretation, careful drafting, and rigorous enforcement. Procurement lawyers, he suggests, will be the human infrastructure without which the digital reforms will collapse under their own weight.
In Enugu, he drove the point home with passion while pointing at his slides on a screen: “This is a procurement process, and at every stage, a lawyer is involved. So when we talk about infrastructure deficits, every lawyer has a role to play here. A lawyer plays a critical role. Unquestionably, lawyers are critical,” he emphasised.
The proposed roles are expansive: handling disputes before they fester, structuring public-private partnerships, drafting IT or health-sector contracts, embedding sustainability safeguards, and interpreting international frameworks like UNCITRAL Model Law.
Critics may argue that Nigeria’s problem is not a shortage of legal categories but a shortage of enforcement. Yet Dr. Adebowale sees it differently. Breadth, he says, is not enough. Depth is the urgent need. Sector-specific procurement lawyers could do for contracts what specialist surgeons do for medicine: focus, precision, and life-saving outcomes.
He has even suggested working with the Nigerian Bar Association to train this new cadre. “Very few lawyers today know about standard bidding documents that govern procurement in Nigeria. Very few. So, if you are going to reduce infrastructure deficits, I challenge lawyers today to take ownership of this bidding document. Know it. It will help us fight infrastructure deficit in this country,” he urged.
What he is really proposing is a re-imagination of the lawyer’s role in Nigeria’s development. Not the passive drafter of agreements after the political work has been done, but the active architect of contracts that determine whether bridges rise, power stations hum, or classrooms are built. Procurement lawyers would be guardians of public trust, defenders of scarce resources, and watchdogs against the familiar predators of corruption.
“Procurement creates legacies that define our contribution to humanity,” he reminded his audience. That line may sound grand, but the logic is hard to dismiss. If Nigeria spends trillions over the coming decades, the contracts will determine whether citizens inherit monuments or mirages. The creation of procurement lawyers could be the difference.
The gauntlet has been thrown. It is now for the Nigerian Bar Association and policymakers to decide whether to grasp it. If they do, they may not just reshape the legal profession. They may also help rebuild the nation, one watertight contract at a time. If they do not, Nigeria risks proving once again that while talk is cheap, badly written contracts are ruinously expensive, regardless of how many obscure Latin phrases are quoted.
■ Sufuyan Ojeifo, MNGE, ANIPR, is publisher/editor-in-chief of THE CONCLAVE online newspaper.
