Nigeria MCPD: The NBA Rules and the 2026 Court Judgment

Nigeria is the most unsettled continuing professional development regime of any major common-law jurisdiction. A mandatory scheme exists on paper, it was switched on in May 2025, and in January 2026 the Federal High Court reportedly set aside the mechanism that gave it teeth.

What survives is a professional obligation with no working enforcement route, and an NBA practising-fee notice for 2026 that does not mention continuing development at all. This guide separates what is verified in the gazette from what rests on press reporting, because on the decisive point the distinction is everything.

What is verified: the Rules of Professional Conduct 2023

The Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners 2023 were published in the Federal Republic of Nigeria Official Gazette No. 103, Volume 110, of 6 June 2023, as Government Notice No. 69, subsidiary legislation serial No. 32. They were made by the General Council of the Bar under section 12(4) of the Legal Practitioners Act, and commenced on 1 January 2024.

Rule 11(1) provides that a lawyer who wishes to practise shall participate in and satisfy the requirements of the mandatory Continuing Professional Development Programme of the Nigerian Bar Association.

Rule 11(4) sets the baseline annual credit hours, expressly subject to the NBA own rules providing otherwise:

• 24 hours for lawyers up to 5 years from admission
• 18 hours for those over 5 and up to 10 years
• 12 hours for those over 10 years

Rule 11(2) lists the qualifying activities: accredited courses, approved lectures and seminars, legal writing in approved publications, approved professional qualifications, and other approved means. Rule 11(5) and (6) require the NBA to establish a CPD Department and permit it to make rules and guidelines covering credit hours, acceptable activities and exemptions.

Rule 12 is the enforcement provision. The NBA publishes an Annual Practising List and issues an Annual Practising Certificate, and entry requires both CPD compliance and payment of the practising fee. Rule 12(3) provides that without a current certificate a lawyer may not appear before a court, tribunal or panel of enquiry, sign pleadings or affidavits, or file documents as a government or corporate legal officer.

That is a severe consequence, and it is the provision that drew the litigation.

The MCPD Rules 2025, and a sourcing problem

The NBA National Executive Council approved Mandatory Continuing Professional Development Rules at its meeting of 6 February 2025, announced publicly on 15 March 2025. Under them, the requirement is a minimum of 5 CPD credit hours or points per year, which the NBA states replaces the 24, 18 and 12-hour tiers in the Rules of Professional Conduct and applies to all lawyers regardless of year of call.

A warning about that figure, and about everything else in this section. The text of the MCPD Rules 2025 could not be obtained. The NBA-ICLE copy now returns a 404 and the Google Drive copy was not retrievable. The 5-point requirement, its attribution to Rule 11 of those rules, and the Financial Hardship Waiver Policy said to sit at Rules 5 and 21 all rest on the NBA own blog posts describing its rules, not on the rules themselves. Anyone relying on the figure for a compliance decision should obtain the instrument from NBA-ICLE directly.

What the NBA describes: credits must come from NBA-ICLE accredited programmes covering legal practice, ethics and professional development; and the hardship waiver offers discounted or waived course fees, free slots at accredited events, and temporary extensions or exemptions for illness or extraordinary circumstances.

What is not published anywhere: cycle start and end dates, any cut-off, and any carry-forward provision. The NBA post of 29 June 2025 states that a points allocation guide is attached; no attachment is present on the page, so the per-activity point values cannot be verified at source.

Enforcement, May 2025

At its Akure meeting of 29 May 2025 the National Executive Council issued a notice, effective immediately, making 5 CPD hours a year a condition of practice licence renewal. Non-compliant lawyers would also be denied access to the NBA Stamp and Seal, and NBA-ICLE and the National Secretariat were to publish an annual list of compliant and non-compliant lawyers. It was signed by Professor Festus Emiri, SAN, as Chairman of the NBA-ICLE Governing Board.

The General Council of the Bar endorsed continued implementation on 7 August 2025, resolving that the programme was in line with the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The judgment, and why it is reported rather than stated

In Victor Ozioma Nwadike v. Nigerian Bar Association, General Council of the Bar and Attorney-General of the Federation, suit number FHC/ABJ/CS/1238/2025, the Federal High Court in Abuja, Hon. Justice Mohammed Umar, is reported to have delivered judgment on 27 January 2026.

The reported holdings are:

• The Legal Practitioners Act is the principal and exhaustive legislation governing a lawyer right of audience, and neither the NBA nor the General Council of the Bar may add to, vary or alter the statutory conditions.
• The Rules of Professional Conduct 2023 and the MCPD Rules 2025 were set aside to the extent that they impose additional conditions on the right of audience, specifically the provisions tying CPD compliance to practising licence renewal, to issue of the NBA stamp and seal, and to the right to appear in court.
• The defendants were restrained from enforcing MCPD compliance as a condition of the right of audience.
• No refund was ordered of fees already paid to third-party providers, and there was no order as to costs.
• Other aspects of professional regulation were left intact, which suggests the CPD obligation survives as a professional duty while the sanctions mechanism falls away.

All of the above comes from news reports. The judgment and the enrolled order were not obtained. There is also a date discrepancy that could not be resolved: two outlets date the judgment 27 January 2026, while the NBA own statement of 9 May 2026 calls it the recent judgment and says the Association is yet to receive and review the full judgment. Either the NBA responded months after the event, or there was a second ruling or enrolled order in May. No appeal is reported anywhere.

The NBA response of 9 May 2026, from General Secretary Dr Mobolaji Ojibara, asserts that the stamp and seal regime remains valid and enforceable, relying on APC v. Sarkin Yaki. Read it carefully: it defends the stamp and seal, and does not assert that CPD remains a condition of licence renewal.

What the 2026 practising fee notice suggests

The most useful indication of the practical position is the NBA own notice on commencement of payment of the 2026 Bar Practising Fee, issued on 2 January 2026. It sets out the conditions for the 2026 Annual Practice Licence, and it does not mention CPD or MCPD at all. Financial compliance, with the fee paid by 31 March 2026, is the only stated condition.

That is an inference from silence rather than a suspension notice. No NBA statement withdrawing or suspending MCPD enforcement could be found. But a licence-renewal notice that omits a condition the Association had declared mandatory eight months earlier is a reasonable indication that the condition is not currently being applied.

Where that leaves a Nigerian lawyer

Three things appear to be true at once, which is why the position is genuinely confusing rather than merely under-reported.

• The obligation exists. Rule 11(1) of the Rules of Professional Conduct 2023 is gazetted, in force since 1 January 2024, and was not struck down in its entirety.
• The sanctions do not currently bite. On the reported judgment, CPD compliance cannot be tied to licence renewal, the stamp and seal, or the right of audience, and the 2026 fee notice is consistent with that.
• No disciplinary route has been identified. Unlike Kenya, whose rules state that non-compliance is professional misconduct, no source attaches a Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee referral to CPD non-compliance in Nigeria.

The honest advice is therefore not to ignore it. A gazetted professional obligation remains a professional obligation, the NBA may yet appeal or re-make its rules on a sounder footing, and the ICLE platform is free. But a lawyer told they cannot renew or appear without CPD credits should know that the court has reportedly held otherwise.

Providers, and a cost figure worth treating with suspicion

Accreditation sits with the NBA Institute of Continuing Legal Education, which describes itself as the NBA regulatory authority for continuing professional development. On 1 August 2025 the NBA announced that 50 NBA branches had been accredited as service providers, with other branches encouraged to seek accreditation.

No accreditation criteria, process or fee is published. The current ICLE accreditation page describes only an internal authoring and review workflow for its own modules, and names no application route or fee for external providers. For anyone considering the market, that is the first thing to establish.

The ICLE platform itself is free to lawyers called to the Nigerian Bar and offers 10 CPD credits across four tracks: the Rules of Professional Conduct 2023; anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing; public procurement and fraud prevention; and proceeds of crime and asset recovery. Its own framework page hedges on the point that matters, saying the points are intended to count toward practising licence renewal in line with NBA requirements.

Third-party course fees have been put at between 30,000 naira and over 1.5 million naira. That range comes from a letter by a campaign group, the Advocacy for Bar Licence Freedom, dated 14 August 2025 and reported in the press. It is not a published schedule from the NBA or from any provider, and it was advanced in support of an argument that the programme imposed economic hardship on junior and rural lawyers. Treat it as an advocacy figure.

No differential requirement or exemption for Senior Advocates of Nigeria appears in any source. The only differentiation ever published was by year of call, in Rule 11(4), which the NBA says the 2025 rules collapsed.

What is coming: the Legal Practitioners Bill 2025

The structural problem the judgment identified is that the NBA tried to add conditions to a statutory right. The obvious fix is statutory, and it is before the National Assembly.

The Legal Practitioners Bill 2025, SB 965, is an Executive Bill to repeal the Legal Practitioners Act. Section 26(1) would provide for a mandatory CPD programme run by the NBA; section 26(2) would empower the NBA to make CPD rules and to accredit other organisations continuing legal education programmes; and section 28(3)(c) would make CPD credits a condition of licence renewal, the very linkage the court set aside, this time on a statutory footing.

The Bill specifies no number of credits or hours. It was before the National Assembly as at 18 December 2025 and still under discussion at the NBA National Executive Council in February 2026. It is not enacted.

Neither the Body of Benchers nor the Council of Legal Education imposes any continuing development requirement, and under the Bill both would remain outside licensing.

How to read Nigeria against its peers

Nigeria design, as intended, was among the strictest anywhere: compliance as a precondition of the licence, the stamp and seal, and the right of audience, with published lists of the non-compliant. Its difficulty was never the level of the requirement, since 5 hours a year is modest, but the attempt to attach severe consequences to it without statutory authority.

Compare Kenya, where the five-unit requirement sits in gazetted rules made under the Advocates Act and non-compliance is stated to be professional misconduct, and India, where the Supreme Court set aside a pre-enrolment training requirement in 1999 on almost identical reasoning before restoring the examination power in 2023. The pattern across all three is the same: in jurisdictions where the profession statute is treated as exhaustive on the right to practise, a regulator that adds conditions by rule will be tested in court, and the question will be one of power rather than of policy.