Tag: African women

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The Marriage That Left No Paper Trail: On Proving Customary Law Marriage in Nigeria by Lawson Akhigbe

Nigerian law has always been more comfortable with paper than with people. A statutory marriage produces a certificate, a registrar, a stamp, a bureaucratic afterlife. A customary marriage produces witnesses, memory, and decades later, when the deceased’s estate is being carved up by relatives who suddenly remember every obligation of kinship a courtroom full of people arguing about who exactly was standing where when the kola nut was broken.

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Dissolution Of Customary Marriages

When a customary marriage is dissolved in Nigeria, the distribution of property and assets does not follow the same rules as a statutory (court) marriage. While statutory marriages are governed by Section 72 of the “Matrimonial Causes Act (MCA)” which grants judges wide discretion to divide matrimonial properties equitably, customary marriages are governed strictly by “Native Law and Custom”, subject to constitutional tests of fairness.

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Life Imprisonment for Child Sexual Assault: Legal Basis and Constitutional Considerations by Lawson Akhigbe

The primary statutory authority for this sentence is Section 260 of the Kebbi State Penal Code Law, 2021, which criminalizes "unnatural offences." While the exact wording of Kebbi State's provision isn't publicly available in full, similar provisions in northern Nigerian penal codes typically define "unnatural offences" as carnal intercourse against the order of nature, which judicial interpretation has extended to include same-sex sexual acts and anal intercourse.

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The Double-Entry Ledger of Suffering: How Nigeria Taxes the Poor Twice and Delivers Nothing Once by Lawson Akhigbe

Reform, when it comes, will be welcomed. The question is whether the reformers are counting the same things Mama Chioma is counting. So far, the evidence suggests they are operating from entirely different ledgers and that only one of those ledgers is written in the ink of lived consequence.

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