What Nigeria’s three inheritance frameworks mean for modern estate planning

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.

For a family with significant financial resources, this framing creates a problem instead of providing a solution.

The regimes are not always alternatives. They are often simultaneous.

Consider an estate that is, by the standards of Nigeria’s wealthy, entirely ordinary: a residence in Lagos, an apartment in London, shares in a privately held company, a parcel of land held under customary tenure in the deceased’s home state, and a family whose religious and ethnic affiliations are not uniform. No single regime governs the estate cleanly. The London flat answers to English succession rules. The company shares and Lagos property fall most naturally under statutory law. The ancestral land may be subject to the customary law of the deceased’s community regardless of what any document says. And where the deceased was Muslim, the question of which assets are reached by Islamic distribution can arise alongside all of the above.

The estate, in other words, does not sit inside one system. It is pulled apart along the seams between several. The decisive variables turn on the nature of each asset, the deceased’s domicile, the form of marriage contracted, the manner in which title is held, and the religious status of the deceased. These determinations are frequently contested, and the interaction between the regimes is unsettled enough that no family should assume a default outcome will fall in its favour.

The cost is paid by those who treat the question as someone else’s.

What a private wealth advisor observes, across many families and many succession events, is that failure is rarely a matter of choosing the wrong framework. It is declining to confront the question at all. An estate left without clear instruction does not escape the three regimes. It is delivered to them, to be apportioned by courts, customary authorities, and surviving relatives whose interests have suddenly diverged. The result is familiar: assets frozen while administration drags, businesses starved of decision-making at the moment they are most fragile, and disputes among relatives who, given a clear structure, would have had no reason to quarrel.

Deliberate structure does not abolish the frameworks. It decides how they bind.

A will, properly drafted and valid under the applicable statute, can govern the assets within its reach and name those who will administer them. A trust can hold and direct property across generations and borders with a continuity a will alone cannot offer. Shareholder agreements and clear corporate succession provisions can separate the fate of a business from the turbulence of a personal estate. Documented domicile and considered ownership structures can reduce the room for argument about which regime reaches which asset.

None of these instruments override customary or religious law where that law genuinely applies; a structure that pretends otherwise invites challenge rather than avoiding it. What deliberate planning achieves is narrower and more valuable. It decides, in advance and with professional guidance, how the frameworks will bind, rather than surrendering that decision to a process the family does not control.

The instruments exist and are available under Nigerian law. The gap has never been in the law. It has been in how rarely families of substantial means put these tools to work before circumstance makes the question urgent, and theirs to answer.

Damilola Alonge is the Founder and Principal Wealth Advisor at WealthHat, a SEC-licensed private wealth advisory firm in Lagos working with high-net-worth families.