21 May

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Kola Tenancy and Land Borrowing: A Critical Analysis of Customary Land Grants

Imagine being handed land on which to build your house, raise your children, and plant your farm. You pay a token amount, maybe the equivalent of a few kolanuts and drinks, and you are let into possession. You build. You farm. Decades pass. Your children take over. They too build. At some point, someone from the original landowner's family shows up and asks for a fresh kola payment to acknowledge their title. If you refuse, the tenancy is at risk. If you agree, you have just confirmed, again, that you are not the owner of the land you have occupied...

20 May

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Allotment and Use: The Legal Rights of Members in Nigerian Family Property

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Class Notes, Land Law

Picture a man who spends thirty years building his life on a piece of land. He clears it, plants crops, constructs a two-storey house with money he earned, watches his children grow up inside its walls. Then he dies. His widow soon discovers that the land was never truly his to give. The family head shows up. Other relatives make their position known. And neither the thirty years of effort, nor the building that still stands, nor the memories baked into the foundation, can alter the legal outcome. This is not a story of injustice or corruption, though it may feel...

17 May

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Partition and Sale: How Family Property is Determined Under Nigerian Law

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Class Notes, Land Law

Every piece of family land that exists today will eventually stop being family land. That is not a prediction. It is a legal certainty. Family property does not last forever. The law provides specific ways in which it comes to an end, and when it does, the consequences for every member of the family are immediate and permanent. Understanding those consequences is essential for examination answers and for anyone advising a family caught in a dispute about whether their land is still family property or whether it has already been determined. What "Determination" Means in This Context Determination simply means the ending...

17 May

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Land Succession Law in Nigeria: Navigating Intestate and Testate Inheritance Rules

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Land Law, Legal News

When a Nigerian landowner dies, the question of who gets the land is rarely simple. The answer depends on at least four things: whether the deceased made a will, what type of marriage he contracted, which customary law governed his personal affairs, and where exactly the land is situated. Get any one of those factors wrong and the entire analysis changes. This is why succession to land rights in Nigeria produces more litigation than almost any other area of property law. This note walks through the rules clearly, covering intestate succession under customary law across the major ethnic groups, testate succession...

16 May

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The Law of Land Pledges in Nigeria: Rights, Redemption, and Customary Rules

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Class Notes, Land Law

Imagine a farmer in rural Oyo State in the 1950s who needs money urgently, perhaps to pay hospital bills or fund a child's education, but has no bank account and no English law mortgage to turn to. The land his family has farmed for generations is his only asset. What does he do? He pledges it. He hands over possession to a creditor who farms it and takes the proceeds until the debt is repaid. No interest accumulates. No foreclosure threatens. And no matter how many years pass, that land remains his to reclaim the moment he produces the original...

16 May

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The Family Head as a Manager: Powers, Duties, and Fiduciary Limits in Nigeria

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Class Notes, Land Law

The courts have described the family head using many different words over the years. Manager. Director. Representative. Agent. Caretaker. Fiduciary. Each of those descriptions appears in decided cases.¹ But the one that best captures his legal position, and the one the Supreme Court used in Akano v. Ajuwon (1982) 11 SC 1, is manager. The manager label is important because it tells you what he is not. He is not a trustee in the English law sense, even though courts have sometimes used that word loosely. The English law trust splits ownership into two: the trustee holds the legal title and...

14 May

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Alienation of Family Land in Nigeria: Analysing Valid, Void, and Voidable Sales

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Class Notes, Land Law

Somewhere in Lagos right now, someone is paying money for a piece of land that another person has no legal right to sell alone. It happens every week. And when the matter eventually reaches court, the buyer discovers that the money is gone but the land is not theirs. In most of those cases, the problem is not fraud in the obvious sense. It is a failure to understand how alienation of family land actually works under Nigerian customary law. This note explains that in full, including the part that most resources leave out: who exactly counts as a "principal member,"...

12 May

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Family Property in Nigerian Customary Law: Ownership, Control, and Legal Status

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 300 Level, Class Notes, Land Law

Every year in Nigeria, thousands of land disputes end up in court because someone sold a piece of land they had no right to sell alone. In many of those cases, the land in question is family property, and the person who sold it either did not know the law or chose to ignore it. By the time you finish reading this note, you will understand exactly why those sales fail in court, why the law is designed the way it is, and how to apply these principles to any exam question or real-world problem that comes before you. Why Customary...

10 May

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Edokpolo & Co. Ltd v. Sem-Edo Wire Industries Ltd & Ors. (1984) 7 S.C. 119; (1984) N.S.C.C. 553 — Supreme Court of Nigeria, 12 July 1984

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Case Analysis, Company Law, Landmark Judgments, Study Resources

Area of Law: Company Law — Pre-Incorporation Contracts; Ratification; Corporate Personality; CAMA Every Nigerian corporate law course places this case at the centre of its pre-incorporation contracts lecture. The principle extracted from it, that a company is not bound by contracts made on its behalf before it existed, and cannot ratify them after, is stated as settled authority in textbooks, lecture notes, and examination answers. What nobody in that tradition stops to examine is Bello JSC's concurring judgment. Bello JSC agreed with the outcome. He did not agree with how the majority got there. His position, that the case should not have...

09 May

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Yalaju-Amaye v Associated Registered Engineering Contractors Ltd [1990] 4 NWLR (Pt. 145) 422

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Case Analysis, Company Law, Landmark Judgments

Engineer Samuel Diden Yalaju-Amaye v Associated Registered Engineering Contractors Ltd & Ors (SC 198/1986) [1990] 4 NWLR (Pt. 145) 422, Supreme Court of Nigeria Area of Law: Company Law — Director Removal, Board Meeting Procedure, Minority Shareholder Protection, Foss v Harbottle A founding engineer named in his company's Articles of Association as permanent Managing Director was pushed out of his own company through a combination of shouting, a fabricated extraordinary general meeting, and forged board minutes. The Supreme Court restored him. In doing so, it confirmed that a director cannot be removed without strict compliance with the statutory procedure under the...

Author: Kolawole Adebowale