Customary Land Rights and Gender Justice in Eastern Nigeria and Ghana

Common approaches to the challenges of tenure discrimination and inequitable land administration system in Nigerian centres on the adoption of statutory legal propositions and judicial proscriptions for the achievement of the desired goals. This entails the adoption and elevation of conventional land administration principles as the ultimate standard for evaluating all other tenurial and land administration systems in Nigeria.
The continued existence of these challenges and emergence of fresh constraints clearly underscore the ineffectiveness of the policy choices and preferred administrative responses to the achievement of desired goals, and the continued reliance on these approaches alone risk marginalising further the voices of local communities, especially women.
In the case of the Igbos of the Eastern Nigeria, this results in failure to address the systemic challenges of tenure insecurity, rural poverty, unsustainable development and continued existence of various outlawed discriminatory customary practices that disinherit and subjugate women. Even the recent Supreme Court’s intervention makes negligible impacts as most of these proscribed practices continue to enjoy social legitimacy and remain operational secretly.
Drawing from the outcomes of the recent Ghanaian reform experiences, this thesis looks at the prospects for reformation and statutory recognition of customary tenure system in Eastern Nigeria using the principles of “Responsible Land Management”, “Fit-for-purpose (FFP)”, “Continuum of land-rights” and “Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM)” land tools. These innovative tools are either implemented together or in parallel. The paper hopes to make its major contribution to knowledge by developing a novel decentralised and hybrid land administration model reflective of social dynamics, cleavages and peculiarities of the Nigerian state. This will provide for the adoption of more realistic, zone-specific, flexible, affordable and scalable land administration system capable of providing secure and equitable land rights for all Nigerians.