Standfirst: The first generation of post-liberalisation private wealth is reaching the age of succession, and it is doing so within a legal field that was never reconciled.
A quiet transfer of wealth has begun in Nigeria. The men and women who built substantial private balance sheets across the two decades since 1999, through banking, energy, real estate, manufacturing, and the professions, are now reaching the age at which succession stops being a distant abstraction. This is the first Nigerian generation to hold a wealth complex enough that estates routinely span operating companies, listed securities, domestic and foreign property, and assets held in more than one country. It is also the first to confront a fact that earlier, simpler estates could often avoid: in Nigeria, more than one inheritance regime can govern the same family at the same time.
Most discussions of Nigerian inheritance present the matter as a question of which system applies. There is the statutory framework, derived from received English law and codified across instruments such as the Administration of Estates Law and the Wills Act as adopted by various states. There is customary law, which varies by ethnic group and community and which the courts continue to recognise and apply. And there is Islamic law, which in much of northern Nigeria governs the estates of Muslims according to fixed Quranic shares. The conventional treatment lines these up as alternatives and asks the reader to identify the relevant one.
