The Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AEAfCFTA) is a revolutionary treaty of the African Union (AU) which creates an African single market to guarantee the free movement of persons, capital, goods and services. The AEAfCFTA is geared towards enabling seamless trade among African countries. The single market relies heavily on the processing of the personal data of persons resident within and outside the AU, thereby necessitating an effective data protection regime. However, the data protection regime across Africa is fragmented, with each country either having a distinct data protection framework or none at all. This lack of a uniform continental framework threatens to clog the wheels of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), because by demanding compliance with the various data protection laws across Africa, free trade will be inhibited, the very problem the AEAfCFTA seeks to remediate. These concerns are considered and applicable solutions are proposed to ensure the successful implementation of the AfCFTA.

In recent times, clash after clash has arisen between herdsmen and farmers in Nigeria. These conflicts were linked to the effects of climate change in northern Nigeria, but have been exacerbated by other factors including ethno-religious sentiments. Herdsmen forced to migrate southwards face intense competition for arable and grazing land with the farmers in Nigeria's middle belt. This invariably leads to conflicts, often resulting in gruesome murder and carnage. Thousands have died, many more have been maimed and millions displaced because of this crisis. As a solution, the Nigerian government proposes to set up grazing reserves and rural grazing area settlements in all states of the federation. The problem with this proposal is how and where to obtain the land. This article reflects on the legal implications of the proposal and argues in favour of grazing reserves and ranching on the basis of a private freehold / leasehold tenure arrangement, not through the compulsory acquisition of land by the government.

In a recent book on the economics of pastoralism in Africa, Konczacki argues that “the present pattern of land use” by pastoralists, “results in the over-exploitation of pastures and precludes the application of rational methods of range movement”. He applies his argument to sub-Sahara Africa in general and maintains that an improvement in the pastoral sector is possible only if the damaging results of “mismanagement” can be prevented and “a scientifically controlled approach” to range management can be introduced. Konczacki is aware that pastoral societies are slow to change and even oppose changes which are imposed upon them, but despite this he claims that “socio-psychological traits alone cannot provide sufficient explanation of their resistance to change”. It is true that a rapid growth of livestock population may lead to an over-exploitation of grazing grounds, and thus will focus the attention of government officials and planners on patterns of land use, so that a policy and a number of measures become necessary to prevent a deterioration of pastures. However, one gets the impression from Konczacki's argument that the existing land tenure system of pastoralists poses a problem at a merely technical level (of “mismanagement”) which can be separated from the “socio-psychological traits” of pastoralists, and solved if the people are only shown how to manage livestock properly and “wisely”. Nor is Konczacki alone in his technical and split view of pastoralists.

In antithesis to legislation on land tenure introduced through the Land Registration Act, 1959, premised on the notion in English common law that the right to allocate land was equivalent to exclusive ownership, “ownership” under customary tenure in Kenya was “essentially heterogeneous and divisible”. People differentiated by age, gender and wealth had bundles of rights defined, in Okoth-Ogendo's words, by “the status differentia which a particular category of membership in a production unit carries”. The complexity and elasticity of customary land law, Okoth-Ogendo demonstrates, derived from its separation of access rights from allocative rights, and the subjection of the latter “to the economic tasks required of the former”. This distinction and the ensuing visibility in legal discourse of both use rights and rights of allocation was critical, as Okoth-Ogendo indicates, in ensuring “the proprietary position” of women, the primary agriculturalists, in societies such as that of the Kikuyu, which are frequently classified as patrilineal.

This essay is part of a study on the development of land law in Somalia from the end of the last century up to present times. In the following pages an attempt is made to illustrate some of the legal problems connected with the grafting of Western law onto an African land tenure system in a colonial setting. Originally agricultural development and exploitation was not the determining aim of the Italian occupation on the Indian Ocean Coast. In the early Italian plans for colonial expansion on the Horn of Africa, Somalia was primarily regarded as an important political and commercial area. The ultimate goal of these plans was the fertile lands of the Ethiopian plateau, towards which Eritrea and Somalia contained respectively, the Northern and Southern access routes. Occupation of the upper and lower regions of what would be the Italian East Africa colony (Africa Orientale Italiana) was the political and military preliminary to conquering the Ethiopian highlands, the produce of which, once the conquest of the whole Horn of Africa had been completed, would find its natural outlets through Eritrean and Somali ports.

Prior to the events which began on January 15th, 1966, Nigeria was a Federal country consisting of four Regions and the Federal Territory of Lagos (a small area including the capital and adjoining areas). Each Region had its own Constitution providing for a bicameral legislature; a Westminster-type ministerial system and cabinet with collective responsibility; a Regional High Court, from which restricted appeal lay to the Supreme Court of Nigeria; a Regional public service with power of appointment and dismissal vested in an independent Public Service Commission; and over all a Governor whose functions were those of a constitutional Head and carefully spelt out in the Constitution. In addition, the North's Constitution provided for the Sharia Court of Appeal, a court of status coordinate with that of the High Court and having exclusive and final appellate jurisdiction in civil cases based on Moslem family law.

The ratification of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) marked a landmark event in the quest to achieve intra-African free trade. AfCFTA is poised to represent the largest free trade area outside the World Trade Organization. Although AfCFTA aspires to liberalize intra-African trade in goods and services to foster socio-economic development, there are concerns that capacity constraints may stultify the underlying goals. AfCFTA is expected to build on the considerable successes already achieved by Africa's regional economic communities. However, it fails to clarify how the overlapping regimes will be reconciled and harmonized. Nevertheless, the agreement is laudable for its quest to facilitate intra-African trade, foster regional value chains that can facilitate integration into the global economy, and energize industrialization, competitiveness and innovation. This article examines the celebrated AfCFTA to understand its potential amid local realities and the possible implications for the multilateral trading system.

This article critically examines the customary laws of inheritance in the communities of southern Nigeria. It argues that the rules are skewed against female beneficiaries, both wives and children. It also argues that courts faced with such customs should subject them to the repugnancy test contained in the Evidence Act 2004, the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 and other international conventions to which Nigeria is party, as do the courts in Ghana, South Africa and Botswana.

The independence of the judiciary is a logical corollary of the principle of separation of powers in that the vesting of judicial functions in a body of persons separate from the executive and the legislature can only have real meaning if that body of persons is truly independent. Virtually all constitutions pay some regard to the principle of separation of powers and the extent to which a constitution guarantees the independence of the judiciary is usually a good measure of the seriousness with which the principle of separation of powers is taken.

Although the prevailing tendency is to view the executive and, to a lesser extent, the legislature as the primary drivers of the developmental process in any country, this paper situates the judiciary in the Nigerian developmental process. Seldom is the judiciary recognized as an equal partner in the developmental process: when the system works, which suggests that their job is being done well, the judiciary is rarely the destination of praise, but as their failure (real or imagined) is often incandescent, blame is easily lavished on them. This article brings attention to what it terms “judicial government” but contextualizes the judiciary's performance against the backdrop of the constraints to which it is subject and it crucially identifies self-inflicted constraints. These self-inflicted constraints impact on the size of the Supreme Court's docket (which affects the quality of dispensed justice) and the issue of costs in the litigation process.

The rights of the individual in the society have been conceived as natural rights—which in the modern state have no more than a moral force. In the context of a modern state which asserts absolute powers within its borders, it appears idle to suggest as in the traditional natural law theories that there is anything like a law of nature existing independently of and overriding positive law.

Before the establishment of British judicial institutions in Nigeria, disputes were settled through the machinery of indigenous traditional tribunals. The character of these varied from one area of the country to another. In the Eastern part of the country, the machinery of justice was rudimentary and in no sense institutionalised. The strong tradition of chieftaincy which existed in the North and West enabled these areas to possess fairly well organised traditional tribunals. From 1898 the government of the Niger Coast Protectorate, in agreement with the local communities, began to create systematised native courts. These courts were purely administrative creations which were neither established nor controlled by statute. In 1900, the Grown took over from the Niger Company and by the Native Courts Proclamation established native courts on a statutory basis in the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. The system of native courts created by this enactment was modified in subsequent years. In 1948 the Brooke Commission of Enquiry was appointed for the Northern, the Eastern, the Western Provinces and for the Colony to review the operation and jurisdiction of the native courts in the various parts of Nigeria. With the introduction of the federal system of government in Nigeria in 1954, the native courts became a residuary matter on which Regional Legislatures alone could legislate. In the subsequent statutes on this matter, the Eastern and Western Regions adopted the new title “customary court” while the Northern Region retained the old title of native court.

The decision of the Nigerian Supreme Court in the case of the Attorney General of the Federation v. the Attorney General of Abia State & 35 Ors. was delivered on 5 April, 2002 in respect of the proviso to section 162(2) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which incorporates what is popularly known in Nigeria as the “derivation formula”. It brought to the forefront the need to determine (especially as regards revenue derived from the oil and gas resources) whether the offshore bed of the territorial sea, exclusive economic zone and continental shelf of Nigeria should be regarded as part of the littoral states of the federation or not? This article critically examines the decision of the Supreme Court as it relates to the “ownership” of the offshore seabed as between the federal Government and the littoral states in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

At the 1999 International Botanical Congress held in St Louis, Missouri, the President of the Congress, Dr Peter Raven, presented a keynote address emphasizing the importance of plants to human existence and underlined concerns that the Earth is undergoing a human-induced extinction crisis. One of the resolutions of the congress was to establish a new co-ordinating body associated with the United Nations to monitor the status of plants throughout the world and take steps to conserve them. The resolutions were followed up with a meeting in Gran Canaria on 3–4 April, 2000 when leading botanists met to formulate a declaration which could be taken forward to the fifth Conference of the Parties (CoP5) to the Convention on Biological Diversity held in Nairobi in May 2000. CoP5 recognized that plant diversity is a common concern of humankind and an essential resource for the planet, with as many as two-thirds of the world's plant species in danger of extinction, and proposed that at the sixth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP6) the establishment of a global strategy for plant conservation should be considered. A strategy with 16 targets was presented and adopted at the CoP6 meeting held in The Hague in April 2002. These targets differ from the normal approach adopted in the Convention on Biological Diversity of using general principles that can be interpreted by national policy, in that they are quantified.

How to reform traditional laws of marriage and divorce has proved to be one of the major legal issues facing contemporary Muslim societies. It is a sensitive issue that impinges on many domains—the social, religious, and political as well as the legal. The problems of reform turn more than anything else on the question of how to reconcile fidelity to Islamic law, the shari'a, which remains largely—if not exclusively—controlling on matters of personal status in many Muslim countries, with the demands for change prompted by the process of modernization.

The statement above is an admission of failure, or neglect, to design a policy for livestock production and development. The admission appears t o be almost contradictory. Nyerere's leadership of Tanzania had its landmarks, the most indelible of which is probably the Arusha Declaration with its particularly heavy bias towards rural development in its policy objectives. Yet that rural bias conspicuously excluded the role of pastoral communities and their potential in the development of Tanzania's rural economy. The pastoralists are not a majority but constitute a substantial portion of the population. They are entitled, as of right, to proportionate attention by national policies, as well as access to national resources, especially land, proportionate to their needs and potential, just like the cultivators. But government policies in Tanzania have marginalized pastoralists and sometimes even their rights and their very presence have been ignored.

It is natural that customary law, as compared to written laws, varies like language from tribe to tribe and that in larger or scattered tribes there are different practices within a tribe itself. Customary legal systems have not been recorded in full. For example, the Turkana who are purely pastoral have no formal land law because grazing and rights to water are common to all members of the tribe. The Ndorobo had transitional rights of hunting and honey-gathering in certain ridges, but have refused to extend such exclusive rights to the cattle of the right-holders, while the Bantu generally have highly developed systems of land tenure in their agricultural areas.

In July 1995 this long-awaited Act was signed into law. Its Preamble states that it is: “To provide for the investigation and establishment of as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed during the period from 1 March 1960 to the cut-off date contemplated in the Constitution, within or without the Republic, emanating from the conflicts of the past, and the fate or whereabouts of the victims of such violations; the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of acts associated with a political objective committed in the course of the conflicts of the past during the said period; affording victims an opportunity to relate the violations they suffered; the taking of measures aimed at the granting of reparation to, and the rehabilitation and the restoration of the human and civil dignity of, victims of violations of human rights; reporting to the Nation about such violations and victims; the making of recommendations aimed at the prevention of the commission of gross violations of human rights; and for the said purposes to provide for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a Committee on Human Rights Violations, a Committee on Amnesty and a Committee on Reparation and Rehabilitation…”

“A social anthropological approach to property as a social institution leads us to the position where we look upon inheritance not as ‘the entrance of living persons into the possession of dead persons’ property’ (a) or even as ‘succession to all rights of the deceased’ (b) but rather as the transference of statuses from the dead to the living with respect to specific property objects.”2 A man holds many statuses each of which probably gives rights and duties in respect of property; on his death these statuses do not necessarily pass to a single individual—they may well pass individually to a number of persons each of whom succeeds to the rights and duties of the particular status which has passed to him. The status may be transferred or may even disappear. If we analyse the Yoruba customary rules of succession in this manner we shall, I believe, be able to dispel some of the confusion which surrounds the concept of ‘family property’, with its attendant problems—the respective rights of sons and brothers to the deceased's property, the rights of daughters to inherit, the rights attaching to individual and family or inherited property, the distinction between movable and immovable property, the rights over individually held houses or cocoa farms situated on family land.