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Commercial disputes could take nearly 13 years from filing to final Supreme Court judgment- Osinbajo


Yemi Osinbajo, former Vice-President of Nigeria.


Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, former vice president of Nigeria, has highlighted that delays in commercial disputes could take nearly 13 years or more from filing to final Supreme Court judgement which is bad for business and investment.

Such delays could also attracting global criticism.

In a compelling address at AELEX law firm’s 19th annual lecture titled: ‘Rule of Law and Economic Development: The Nigerian Experience’, the former vice president dissected the root causes of Nigeria’s sluggish investment climate, drawing connections between judicial inefficiency, policy inconsistency, and economic stagnation.

He mapped a pragmatic path forward: efficiency, digital reform, institutional discipline, and people-centred governance.

Read also:US flags human rights, justice delays, economic strain in Nigeria

Delayed justice system

Speaking on broader commercial disputes, Osinbajo presented fresh findings from the Justice Research Institute, which he described as staggering. According to the report, “a commercial case sits in the high court for between four years and two months. If appealed, it will spend another three years and four months in the court of appeal. And if it goes on to the Supreme Court, it takes another six years and six months more to conclude.”

He summed it up saying, “Altogether, a commercial dispute can take nearly 13 years from filing to final Supreme Court judgment.”

He also recalled a 2015 case before the UK Court of Appeal involving the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), where the court referred to the delays in the Nigerian court as catastrophic… saying it could take a further 30 years to resolve the case.”

Speaking from experience, he outlined practical reforms to restore confidence in governance, strengthen investor trust, and refocus policy on citizens’ welfare.

The landlord’s dilemma: When delayed justice kills investment

Osinbajo began by recounting a troubling trend in Lagos when investors were turning away from property development and channelling funds into stocks and bonds instead.

“They were preferring to invest in stocks and bonds rather than building houses for rent,” he said, explaining that “many landlords simply lost confidence in the courts.”

The reason was simple but devastating. “The magistrate court process was painfully slow. Tenants would often pay for a couple of years, three years’ rent in advance, and then stop paying, betting that if the landlord sued, the case would drag on for years while the tenants stayed rent-free.”

To address the crisis, Osinbajo and his team launched mediation centres under the Lagos State Citizens’ Rights Project, providing faster and fairer resolutions.

Read also: Nigeria’s justice system failing the poor, Sultan of Sokoto cries out

“We enlisted trained volunteer mediators, most of them lawyers in the Ministry of Justice. In one year, the mediation centres resolved over 8,000 landlord and tenant cases, whereas the magistrate court had completed only 2,000 within the same year.”

Sanctions, costs and court discipline

To reverse this decay, Osinbajo advocated for adverse and heavy sanctions and court discipline.

He recounted a personal experience from his advisory days at the Ministry of Justice, “The court fined us about £200,000 for just being late. It’s only heavy costs, in my opinion, that will discourage non-results.” That, he said, was an effective deterrent.

Open, digital scheduling and case tracking

He further recommended the creation of specialised commercial courts and the digitisation of court processes.

“It’s no longer rocket science,” he said pointedly. “Everyone else everywhere else is doing all these things. Open, digital scheduling and case tracking, would curb corruption and increase transparency”.

Discouraging the interference of courts with arbitration proceedings

Osinbajo also criticised the tendency of Nigerian courts to interfere with arbitration proceedings, warning that it undermines an essential mechanism for quick dispute resolution. “The moment a court gets into arbitration, it means that the entire alternative dispute resolution method is drawn into the slow judicial process,” he cautioned.

Referring to conflicting appellate judgments on the issue, he emphasised that “we must, as a matter of legal policy, discourage even more intensely the interference of courts with arbitration, except in the most extreme and urgent cases.”

Encouraging early enforcements of judgements and bureaucracy

Even after litigants secure a judgment, Osinbajo observed that  enforcement remains a major hurdle.

He also lamented the difficulty of enforcing judgments against government entities, pointing to Section 84 of the Sheriff and Civil Processes Act, which requires the Attorney General’s consent before enforcement.

“That consent is unlikely to ever come. There are far too many bureaucratic inefficiencies, procedural complexities, a lack of cooperation sometimes from law enforcement agents. Enforcements are abandoned because of the high cost and the low success rate”, he said.

Policy continuity to increase investor confidence

Osinbajo then turned to another major deterrent to investment: policy inconsistency. “Study after study has shown that when you have policy reversals, it generally hampers investment for local and foreign direct investment,” he said.

From sudden bans on agricultural imports to erratic telecoms regulations, he argued, such unpredictability regularly affects expansion plans.

He therefore called for institutional reforms and cross-party collaboration to ensure continuity. “There should be stakeholder consultations before policy shifts,” he advised. “We can also create a national investment channel and get cross-party support… making it more difficult for government to arbitrarily abandon what its predecessors have done.”

People-centred development and the duty of the state

At the heart of his address was a moral and economic argument: development must serve people, not just profit. “The business of government, the fundamental business of government, is the security and welfare of the people,” he reminded his audience.

Osinbajo rejected the trickle-down development model, asserting that “the bottom of the pyramid is too large for us to ignore.” With nearly 70 per cent of Nigerians under 25, he warned that “the failure to address these needs will threaten security, which means it will threaten economic development.”

“By putting ordinary people first,” he said, “by expanding opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid, we can make our society more stable and growth more sustainable.”

A call for collaborative reform

Osinbajo noted that Nigeria’s problems are not of lack of policy or laws, but of weak execution and human failure. “We must reduce human discretion in the operation of our regulatory agencies,” he urged.

He called for a “meeting of the minds” between the executive, legislature, and judiciary, alongside the private sector, to drive reform. “Every problem is human. Each of these sectors must see how one failure affects the others and decide to collaborate intentionally to deliver economic development.”

Ngozi Ekugo is a Snr. Correspondent/ analyst at Businessday. She has worked across various sectors, and notably had a brief stinct at Goldman Sachs, London.

She holds an MSc Management from the University Hertfordshire, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Lagos and is an alumna of Queen’s college.

She is also an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM).



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