This article examines the framework of Nigeria's local content laws and policy, and the implications for sustainable development. The legislation is geared towards safeguarding local productivity and aiding the progressive aspirations of Nigeria's citizens. While commendable in principle, there have been questions about policy articulation, implementation and enforcement mechanisms, especially with regard to the Sustainable Development Goals. The article examines the local content legislation in Nigeria, and how policies have shaped the community-corporate nexus. This exposes the challenges facing extractive resource governance in a jurisdiction such as Nigeria and the discourses that have permeated legal scholarship on the practical deference to local content by non-state actors. It considers that well designed and implemented local content requirements are catalysts for structural development. To achieve sustainable development of its extractive sector, Nigeria requires state-led determination to stimulate economic growth and development. The article argues for continuous consultation as a bedrock for meaningful engagement.

Global regulators acknowledge the negative economic impact linked to insider dealing and have devised diverse regulatory frameworks aimed at minimizing its prevalence. Although their strategies differ, policy-makers realise that, with the inevitable internationalization of securities markets, the probability of cross-border insider trading escalates. With a view to providing a platform for regulatory re-examination and reform, this article discusses the divergent approaches that the United States and South Africa have adopted to counter the challenge of pervasive insider dealing. A paradox manifested with the US experience is that, while its theoretical prohibition of insider dealing is widely criticized as inadequate and inconsistent, robust enforcement has nonetheless led to strong institutions and a superior financial markets regime. The article concludes that the attainment of safer financial markets does not depend on the mere existence of superior proscriptions. Rather, it is the effective supervision of the sector and robust enforcement of those laws that enhance deterrence and ensure compliance.

The 1994 Malawian Constitution is unique in that it, among other things, recognizes administrative justice as a fundamental right and articulates the notion of constitutional supremacy. This right and the idea of constitutional supremacy have important implications for Malawi's administrative law, which was hitherto based on the common law inherited from Britain. This article highlights the difficulties that Malawian courts have faced in reconciling the right to administrative justice as protected under the new constitution with the common law. In doing so, it offers some insights into what the constitutionalization of administrative justice means for Malawian administrative law. It is argued that the constitution has altered the basis and grounds for judicial review so fundamentally that the Malawian legal system's marriage to the English common law can be regarded as having irretrievably broken down as far as administrative law is concerned.

The sole issue of importance in this case was the choice of law for determining entitlement to the estate. The most remarkable of the court's holdings is the proposition that Moslem law governs the estate of an intestate Moslem because it is the customary law to which he was subject. Before discussing this it is necessary to examine the line of reasoning by which it was reached.

The problems of the absence or infrequency of states parties reports to the African Commission and the inadequacy of many that are submitted needs to be addressed. At the 25th session of the African Commission, South Africa presented its initial report. This process before, during and after the examination of the report is discussed and provides both encouragement for states to comply with their reporting obligations under the African Charter and useful lessons for states wishing to improve the quality of their reports.

The Ninth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (the Ninth Congress), was held in Cairo, Egypt from 29 April to 8 May, 1995. It followed the sequence of United Nations quinquennial congresses on the prevention of crime and die treatment of offenders which began in 1955 as a direct continuation of die international penitentiary congresses that had been organized by the International Penal and Penitentiary Commission (IPPC) since the 19tii century. The congresses are convened by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on die basis of General Assembly Resolution 415(V) of 1950. The Nindi Congress was attended by delegates from 138 states, several United Nations offices and organs, including specialized agencies, various inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations and over 190 individual experts. This was die first time the Congress was held on the African continent.

This is an examination of the circumstances in which, according to legal authorities, land may become family land in the customary law of Ghana.3 There may occasionally be difficulty in discovering whether the acquisition was by a wider family or by a branch (or segment) of it, since each such smaller group constitutes a “family” for different purposes. Normally, however, the circumstances give a clear answer, and difficulties on this point rarely reach the courts. If, for example, the narrower family lived in a different part of the country, or acted in the transaction through its own head rather than the overall head, or was already regarded by members of the other branches as a separate entity conducting its own affairs, the acquisition will accrue to this smaller family. The only serious difficulties in this respect have occurred when the acquisition was by intestate succession, a means which will not be discussed in detail. Therefore the distinction drawn by Sarbah4 between “ancestral property” and “family property” will not be followed here.

Widows throughout sub-Saharan Africa may be at risk from dispossession when their husbands pass away. Whereas some scholars view widow dispossession as prevalent and global, others suggest that the issue is less common than claimed. This article contributes to understanding about the frequency of, and reasons for, widow dispossession through an empirical investigation of widowhood in Cameroon. By adopting a comparative method, working with similar groups in both francophone and anglophone regions, it presents preliminary findings. These findings include a higher awareness of widow dispossession in anglophone areas compared to francophone samples. Moreover, notably fewer marriages are legally registered in the anglophone dataset, compared to the francophone group, which may place anglophone widows at greater risk of dispossession. The article then assesses the impact of custom, religion, civil law and common law on the findings. In conclusion, it recommends the need for a holistic consideration of land rights.

It has partly been assumed that the constitutional obligation to pay compensation for expropriations is to blame for the slow pace at which land has been redistributed in South Africa. However, this assumption requires careful analysis and reflection, with reference to the imperfections of the policies and laws that set out to address landlessness, as well as the underlying theoretical approach to economic justice. This article questions the purpose for which land reform beneficiaries acquire land, with reference to the role that property should ideally fulfil for the landless. The article makes a number of observations to cast light on why the redistribution of land has been alarmingly slow, where inconsistencies and loopholes exist in the programme, and whether expropriations for nil compensation will make any difference in remedying existing failures in the redistribution programme.

In the southern parts of Nigeria, as in many other African territories,2 two systems of law, English and customary law, are both in force at the same time. That situation naturally presents problems of what are termed internal conflicts: which system of law should be applied in a particular case? When, as is most common, such a problem arises directly out of some transaction, the difficulty is not likely to be great, since there have been enacted by statute fairly precise rules which cover that sort of situation.3 Those rules, however, are framed in terms of the persons involved in the case (are they “natives” or “non-natives”?4) and of agreements and transactions between such persons. There can arise other issues involving conflicts where the statutes give little guidance, and it is the object of this article to examine one such issue, namely the applicability of English and customary law to land, as opposed to the persons owning it. Only the Nigerian authorities on the point are discussed, but it is fair to assume that the problems with which they have dealt are typical of the experience of many other countries where a system of law of European origin and adapted to the purposes of a commercial society has been superimposed upon an indigenous law which has mainly evolved in static, rural communities.

In the closing paragraph of his inaugural lecture Law and Language, Professor Allott referred to what he termed “a daunting obstacle” to the intensive study of African legal systems.

That obstacle is the rapid disappearance, before our very eyes, of the traditional systems that we have proposed to study. A generation ago there would not have been that difficulty; but today the traditional tribunals have vanished in many African countries where their place has been taken by statutory local courts. Even where the traditional courts appear to have survived, at least in name, they are usually affected by the impact of western law and institutions and of central government control.

Those words were written in 1965. How true and necessary they were is shown by the fact that more than fifty years previously—even more than “a generation ago”—the impact of “western” influences upon the Tswana peoples of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now the Republic of Botswana) had already led to many changes in the indigenous legal system, although, at that time, the “traditional courts” still survived virtually intact and not merely “in name”.

The nature and extent of those changes can be readily ascertained by the fortunate chance that, there are still available the records of approximately 470 cases tried, over a period of six and a half years, in the highest traditional court of the Ngwaketse, a major Tswana chiefdom.

The United Nations is entering the third development decade designated by a resolution which is part of the series now consisting of three texts which have guided the efforts of the United Nations over the last 20 years. The present document took a long time to produce and was the object of particular care and attention. The General Assembly resolution of 17 December, 1977, provided that:

— all negotiations should be conducted within the framework of U.N. institutions

— an extraordinary session of the General Assembly should be held in 1980 to assess and to identify the new strategy for development

— a plenary committee should be established, open to all member states, to prepare for the meeting of the Extraordinary Session in 1980.

On the one hand the third decade was to open “global negotiation” and the plenary committee was to prepare the ground for these negotiations; on the other hand, a committee was to devise the new strategy and to present it to the Eleventh Special Session. Those were the two aims; and the Group of 77 were determined to link them in a single ten-year-plan, in what is called in the U.N. terminology a ten years strategy. Three of these strategies have been adopted so far. The General Assembly in its resolutions A/1710 (XVI) and A/1715 (XVI), 19 December, 1961, declared the period 1960–70 the first U.N. Decade of development: a period in which special efforts should be made by all, in favour of those who live in the less developed countries.

From the evidence of the minute paper which preceded the drafting of the first African reception statute, it may be asserted that the intendment of the Colonial Office officials was:

(1) that the limiting date in the statute was to apply as well to the common law and the doctrines of equity as to the statutes of general application;

(2) that the phrase “Imperial Laws”, refers as well to the common law and doctrines of equity as to the statutes of general application, so that the West African courts were granted a plenitude of power to determine the applicability to local conditions of judge-made law as well as legislation.

It is difficult, however, to determine the intendent of the phrase, “statutes of general application”, in the premises.