Alternative Dispute Resolution in Nigeria: Breaking New Boundaries

The field of Alternative Dispute Resolution is familiar. This may be due to the invariably recurring decimal of conflicts in society’s various human and commercial interactions. This paper examines the legislative framework of Nigeria’s Arbitration and Mediation Act and the fundamental guiding principles from which arbitration laws are derived.  Arbitration has moved from the stage of rejection to suspicion and acceptance. It is still budding in the Nigerian legal system but creating workable avenues and mechanisms to solve conflicts remains indispensable. Litigation, being the structured court system based on adversarial conversations and determination of the disputes, which is determined by a judgment produced in a win-lose situation, may therefore be defined as the opposite of Alternative Dispute Resolution, which is purely non-adversarial and utilises the expertise and assistance of a skilled, impartial and neutral third party. Since the 2005 Bank Consolidation Era and the 2008 Financial Crisis, there have been calls for the arbitration of banking disputes. However, these calls are yet to be embraced, given the reactionary response of banks toward referring conflicts to litigation forums. This leaves so much to be desired. As a result, this paper highlights the recent incorporation of Alternative Dispute Resolution into conflict resolution rules and discusses the necessity for appropriately specified procedural frameworks.