Dying intestate does not mean your wealth goes nowhere. It means it goes somewhere determined by a body of law you never read, applied in an order you did not choose.

The most consequential fact about dying without a will in Nigeria is one most families never confront: the law that will divide your estate is not selected at your death. It turns, in large part, on the form of marriage you contracted, often decades earlier. Nigerian intestate succession runs along three separate tracks, and they produce materially different outcomes for the same family, the same assets, and the same survivors.

This is the part of estate planning that resists intuition. People assume that without a will, assets pass to spouse and children in some natural order. There is no single natural order in Nigeria. There are three systems, they diverge, and which one applies is not a matter of preference.

Your form of marriage shapes which law governs your estate

Nigerian intestate succession is governed by statutory law, customary law, or Islamic law, and the principal determining factor is the type of marriage the deceased contracted.

A person married under the Marriage Act, the statutory or "court" marriage, is treated by the law as having elected statutory governance in matters of succession. The Supreme Court settled this in Olowu v Olowu: once a person marries under the Marriage Act, the Administration of Estates Law governs the estate, and customary law does not apply, even where the deceased would otherwise be subject to it by ethnicity. A person married only under customary law is governed by the customary law of their community. A person married under Islamic law is governed by the applicable rules of Sharia inheritance.

These are not interchangeable. They differ on who inherits, in what share, and in some cases on whether a widow inherits at all. A family that plans around the statutory rule, when the marriage was in fact customary, may be planning around a distribution that will never occur.

What the statutory rule actually provides

For those married under the Marriage Act and domiciled in a state operating the Administration of Estates Law, such as Lagos, the residuary estate follows a defined formula: the surviving spouse takes one-third, and the children divide the remaining two-thirds equally. Where there are no children, the estate is shared between the spouse and the deceased's parents or siblings, and only in the absence of immediate family do more distant relatives inherit.

Two points are routinely misunderstood. The one-third and two-thirds division applies to the residuary estate, and the treatment of real property can follow different rules, which is one reason intestate estates holding significant land so often become contentious. And the statutory framework, unlike much customary practice, draws no distinction in principle between children born within and outside the marriage. In Salubi v Nwariaku, the Supreme Court confirmed that children born out of wedlock were entitled to share equally with the children of the marriage. For a family that has never discussed this openly, the discovery arrives at the worst possible moment.

What customary law can mean for a widow

The distance between statutory and customary outcomes is widest, and most painful, in the position of the surviving spouse. Under a number of customary regimes a widow does not inherit her late husband's property, and in some communities she has historically been treated as belonging to the estate rather than benefiting from it. The Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 now prohibits the forced disinheritance of widows and safeguards their property rights, and the courts have moved against the harshest customary practices. Even so, where a marriage was customary and no will exists, a widow can find her entitlement contested by her late husband's wider family.

This is the clearest illustration of the article's central point. The protection a will offers such a widow is not marginal adjustment at the edges. It is the difference between provision and a dispute she may not win.

Where intestacy turns into contest

The distribution rules describe the outcome the law intends. The reality is frequently a courtroom, because intestacy invites challenge in precisely the situations a Nigerian HNW family is most likely to present: more than one family, children across different relationships, a business in which personal and corporate assets were never separated. Once it is clear no document settles the matter, relatives with plausible claims tend to surface.

A contested intestate estate then runs through the same frozen administration described elsewhere in this series, only for longer. Accounts cannot be drawn on and property cannot be transferred while the dispute proceeds, and a contested grant in Lagos can take years rather than the months an uncontested one requires. The family owns the wealth throughout. It simply cannot reach it.

The point is not the formula. It is that you did not choose it

Most discussions of intestacy fixate on the percentages. The percentages are the least of it. The substantive fact is that dying without a will surrenders the most important decision about your wealth to a system selected by your form of marriage, administered by a court on its own timetable, and open to challenge by anyone with a credible claim. Whatever that system produces will not be tailored to your family, because it was never designed to be.

A will, properly drafted and coordinated with the rest of an estate, replaces that default with intention. It does not dissolve every complexity, and it does not by itself reach jointly held assets, named-beneficiary policies, offshore holdings, or the structure of a business. What it ends is the most dangerous assumption a family can make: that the law, left alone, will arrive at what they would have wanted.

Because intestate succession in Nigeria turns on the form of marriage and intersects statutory, customary, and Islamic frameworks, often alongside the laws of more than one jurisdiction, families should engage qualified legal and tax advisors to establish where they actually stand and to put a valid will and supporting structure in place. This is the work we do at WealthHat, alongside the specialist legal advisors a sound estate requires.

Sources: Marriage Act; Administration of Estates Law (Lagos State); Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015; Olowu v Olowu (1985); Salubi v Nwariaku (2003). Statute and case law current as at the date of writing and subject to change. This article is general in nature and is not legal or tax advice.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice. Families should engage qualified professional advisors in developing a plan appropriate to their specific circumstances.

WealthHat Private Wealth Management