Opinion: Did the Law School Keep the Faith? – Abdul Mahmud

By Abdul Mahmud

The reported death of Faith Alayande, a 23-year-old female student of the Nigerian Law School who was found dead after a fall from the rooftop of a hostel at the School’s Lagos Campus in the early hours of Friday, 7 August 2026, should not be reduced to another tragic piece in the daily news cycle. The Nigerian Law School has confirmed the death and said that it is investigating the circumstances, while the police have also commenced inquiries. Reports that Alayande was undertaking an externship at the Lagos Campus after being enrolled at the Enugu Campus make the circumstances particularly deserving of careful examination, especially because movement between campuses and placement environments can separate students from the support structures upon which they normally depend. No responsible person should presume, before the investigation is completed, what caused Faith to die, and certainly no institution should be condemned for a failure that has not been established by evidence. The question that her death nevertheless forces upon us is larger than the circumstances of one morning: what duty does a tertiary institution owe to the psychological welfare, physical safety and general wellbeing of the young people placed in its care?

Nigeria has become accustomed to treating tertiary education as though the institution’s responsibility begins with collecting fees, conducting lectures and examinations, and ends when the student walks out of the examination hall. Such a conception of education is dangerously narrow, particularly in institutions where students are subjected to intense academic pressure, professional uncertainty, financial strain, separation from family and the demands of transition into adult life. A student is not simply a candidate for an examination; a student is a person whose wellbeing can affect the capacity to learn, perform and remain safe.

British universities provide a useful point of comparison, not because Britain has eliminated student mental-health crises, or because its universities are incapable of institutional failure, but because student welfare has increasingly been incorporated into the formal responsibilities of university life. The NHS states that most universities in the United Kingdom provide free and confidential counselling services staffed by professionally qualified counsellors and psychotherapists, while many institutions also have mental-health advisers who help students obtain additional support. Students experiencing low mood, anxiety, stress or other difficulties can seek assistance without first having to establish that they have a diagnosed psychiatric condition. The point goes further: a student does not have to reach the point of psychiatric crisis before an institution considers intervention appropriate. A student struggling with anxiety before examinations, deteriorating emotionally after a family crisis, becoming overwhelmed by academic demands, or showing signs of persistent low mood may be referred for counselling or other support long before the circumstances become an emergency. The institutional philosophy is preventive rather than purely reactive.

Some British universities go further by connecting university-based support with the National Health Service. The University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University, for example, have access to an NHS-linked mental-health student service providing psychological support and clinical care. Universities UK has also recognised that students undertaking placements may face particular mental-health risks because they can be separated from familiar support structures, and has urged universities and placement providers to maintain appropriate support before, during and after placements. Such arrangements should make Nigerian educational administrators uncomfortable, because they expose how little of our institutional conversation about student welfare is concerned with the student as a whole human being.

The Nigerian Law School is not an ordinary institution of learning; it is a professional institution whose students arrive after years of undergraduate legal education and are placed under considerable pressure as they prepare for entry into one of the most demanding professions in the country. The Bar Final examinations carry enormous consequences for young people who have already invested years of study and substantial financial resources in becoming lawyers. Expectations are high, competition is real and failure can carry a heavy emotional burden. An institution operating within such an environment should have a welfare structure commensurate with the pressures imposed upon its students. Counselling should therefore not be treated as an ornamental service, brought into existence to satisfy an administrative checklist. There should be professionally trained counsellors or psychologists whom students can approach confidentially, without fear that seeking help will be interpreted as weakness. There should be clear procedures for identifying students in serious distress, mechanisms through which lecturers, hostel officials and fellow students can raise concerns, and a pathway for referring students requiring specialised psychiatric care to appropriate medical services.

Physical safety requires the same seriousness. If a hostel permits students access to a rooftop from which a person can fall to her death, questions about the design, access controls, barriers, surveillance and emergency procedures should form part of the investigation. The answer cannot simply be that the student should not have gone there. Institutions have a duty to anticipate foreseeable risks within facilities under their control, particularly where young people live, study and spend substantial periods away from their families. The larger problem is the culture of Nigerian tertiary education, where students are frequently expected to endure almost everything in silence. Poor accommodation, inadequate welfare facilities, administrative hostility, financial pressures, overcrowding and academic stress are often treated as unavoidable features of student life. Fees rise, while the quality of the services provided frequently fails to rise with them. Students are charged for accommodation, development, registration and other institutional services, but the language of consumer responsibility is rarely accompanied by an equally serious understanding of institutional responsibility.

A university or professional institution is not absolved of responsibility because students are adults. Adulthood does not make a person immune to emotional distress, and intellectual maturity does not make a person immune to depression, anxiety, despair or psychological crisis. The NHS itself recognises that students with ordinary life difficulties can benefit from counselling and that support should be accessible before a diagnosed mental-health condition develops. The lesson from Britain is therefore not that Nigeria should reproduce the British university system; it is that student welfare must become part of the core business of education rather than an afterthought to academic administration.

Faith Alayande’s death should prompt the Nigerian Law School to ask difficult questions of itself, and the answers should not be confined to the immediate circumstances of her death. Was there an accessible counselling service? Did students know where to seek confidential psychological assistance? Were hostel personnel trained to recognise signs of distress? Were there adequate procedures for responding to students considered vulnerable? Was the hostel physically designed with suicide prevention and general safety in mind? Did students undertaking externships retain meaningful access to welfare support from the institution? Nigerian universities and professional institutions should also be asking themselves the same questions.

There is also a danger in allowing the language of suicide prevention to become detached from the broader question of institutional care. A university or professional institution cannot prevent every tragedy, and no responsible analysis should suggest otherwise. Mental-health crises arise from complicated circumstances that institutions cannot always see or control. The obligation is to create an environment in which distress can be recognised, help can be reached without stigma, and obvious physical risks are taken seriously. Faith’s name should therefore remain in this discussion not as an accusation against an institution before the facts are established, but as a reminder of what can be lost when education is reduced to examinations, fees and certificates. The Nigerian Law School trains people who will spend their professional lives arguing about rights, duties and accountability. So, its own treatment of student welfare should reflect the seriousness of those principles. A point to note here: the law school cannot guarantee the outcome of every student’s struggle; but it can, however, ask whether a student in distress can reach appropriate help and whether the conditions in which students live reflect a serious commitment to their welfare. Faith deserved an institution that kept watch over more than her academic performance. The question now is: did the law school keep the faith?