From all indications, Lateef Olasunkanmi Fagbemi, an accomplished Nigerian lawyer who became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) at record time of 10 years at the Bar, will soon become Nigeria’s 24th Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice.
The office, the only ministerial position directly created in the Nigerian constitution to perform some specialised duties, is reserved for lawyers; so it makes it easy to guess that the next AGF will come from among the lawyers on the ministerial nominees list just submitted to the Senate for screening.
The first batch of President Bola Tinubu’s ministerial nominees sent to the Senate on Thursday has three lawyers, with Mr Fagbemi the only senior advocate (SAN) among them. This contrasts remarkably with the SAN-studded cabinet of the immediate-past president, Muhammadu Buhari. That had made it hard to tell who the former president would deploy to the Ministry of Justice after he belatedly presented his first…