Rethinking women and customary inheritance in Nigeria

Abstract

This article reviews women’s quest to access land, property, and housing by inheritance and succession from their deceased father’s or husband’s estate and judicial responses thereto. It submits that tradition or custom-based gender differentiations are discriminatory against women on grounds of sex and are, as such unconstitutional. The problem has been the absence of a legal and policy framework empowering women and granting them explicit right to land in their capacity as citizens with full legal capacity as envisaged by both the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW: 1979); and the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol, 2003). The article also analyses the high illiteracy level that has made most women ignorant of the existing legislations and courts judgments which have recognised their rights to inheritance of real properties in Nigeria. The article finds that Nigeria through judicial activism is currently empowering women to access and inherit land, though more efforts are still needed to total liberate and enforce the rights of women to customarily inherit property.