Women and land rights reforms in Nigeria
Aluko, Bioye Tajudeen & Abdul-Rasheed Amidu
Land rights are usually conceived of as the rights to use, enjoy and exploit land including information about, decision making around and benefits from the latter. Womenns land rights are fragile and transient, being dependent upon age and marital status (including type of marriage and the success of that marriage), whether they had children (including the number and sex of those children) and their sexual conduct. And, inspite of the Nigerian Land Use Act (LUA) of 1978, which restructured the property rights system in the country from a mixed private property rights system into a collectivist framework, concerns about womenns land rights persist. Thus, the impact of inequality in land rights has aggravated womenns socio economic status, increased the number of women engaging in sex work, allowed for sexual harassment and violence against women and contributed towards marital instability, separation and divorce. But, landholding systems are now considered to be spontaneously evolving with greater market integration, even without state sponsored protection of private land rights. As such, with the government readiness to review the LUA, the paper, through case studies and a survey of relevant literature, demonstrates that gender is central to understanding organization and transformation of landholding in Nigeria, shaping womenns differential experience of tenure insecurity, not only as wives, but also as sisters and daughters and as divorced or widowed head of households. It is also, prima facie, argued that in the context of globalization occasioning greater market integration, women could contest claims made on their land, but, their ability to negotiate access to land needs to be supported and harnessed into land policies.
Event: 5th FIG Regional Conference for Africa : Promoting Land Administration and Good Governance
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