Tag: culture

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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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EDITORIAL: Osun election, the rise of civic action, and 2027 by PREMIUM TIMES

Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun State was re-elected for a second term in the 15 August governorship contest. It was an off-cycle election like no other before it, in the build-up, with its eerie elements of tension, violence and resultant deaths.

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Anarchism in judicial robes, by Owei Lakemfa

My mind raced back to British jurist, Lord Denning who famously declared in 1964: “Justice has no place in darkness or secrecy. When a judge sits on a case, he himself is on trial… If he is suspicious, biased, or unfair, then the judge is the one who is condemned in the eyes of public opinion.” But these words of wisdom seem not to have any meaning to Justice Lifu, shockingly, a former lecturer of Public and International Law, University of Ibadan. For me, what was more distressing was that despite the uproar, Justice Lifu seemed oblivious of the damage he    had done to the body polity, the judiciary and his thirty five years post-call to bar history.

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