ENUGU, NIGERIA — The ongoing standoff between the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and the leadership of the Enugu State judiciary has intensified, as legal practitioners lay the blame for a prolonged crisis directly at the feet of the state’s Chief Judge. The Nsukka and Obollo-Afor branches of the NBA have jointly accused Chief Judge Justice Afojulu Raymond Ozoemena of total administrative negligence and a failure to address severe bottlenecks that are currently crippling the administration of justice within the Enugu North Senatorial District.
At the heart of the dispute is an enforced three-year absence of physical High Court sittings in the district. According to the legal body, High Court judges assigned to the area have abandoned their physical courtrooms for over 36 months, choosing instead to conduct all legal proceedings virtually from Enugu, the state capital. This arrangement, the NBA argues, has turned into an operational disaster due to a severe lack of basic digital infrastructure in local courts. Rather than utilizing robust, dedicated remote-hearing facilities, virtual sessions are frequently forced to rely on the personal mobile phones and data plans of lawyers and court staff. This makeshift setup has led to constant dropouts, terrible network connectivity, and an overall degradation of court decorum.
The logistics of the virtual system have also created an immense financial and physical burden for everyone involved. To facilitate the remote system, physical case files and crucial judicial registries were quietly relocated from Nsukka and Obollo-Afor to Enugu. This means that local litigants, clerks, and attorneys must frequently travel long distances just to file paperwork or review documents, driving up legal costs in an already difficult economic climate.
In response to the Chief Judge’s refusal to acknowledge an official grievance letter delivered as far back as March 23, 2026, local lawyers staged a peaceful protest on June 3, 2026. Following that demonstration, the branches initiated an indefinite boycott of all High Court proceedings in the district, which has now crossed the two-week mark with no resolution in sight.
The NBA has firmly rejected the common defense that judges are staying away due to security threats along the notorious Ugwuogo-Opi expressway. The association pointed out the irony that local lawyers, court support staff, and ordinary citizens are forced to navigate that exact highway every single day to keep the system moving. Furthermore, they argued that states in other regions of Nigeria facing significantly higher security risks still manage to hold physical court sessions to protect the constitutional rights of their citizens.
To break the deadlock, the striking lawyers are demanding an immediate end to the mandatory virtual format and a swift return to physical courtrooms. They have proposed practical alternatives, calling on the Chief Judge to either coordinate robust, dedicated security escorts for the presiding judges or arrange for official, secure judicial housing within the Nsukka and Obollo-Afor divisions so the jurists can live where they work. Until these administrative reforms are enacted, the NBA maintains that its court boycott will remain firmly in place.