Contemporary Issues Affecting the Rights and Obligations of Landlords under Extant Laws in Nigeria and England

The rights and obligations of landlords in Nigeria have been affected by a series of legislative interventions and case law over the years. Every State in Nigeria has its own Landlord and Tenant Law. The application of the general principles of leasehold law reflects the context of the particular letting. In England as in Nigeria, there are many distinct statutory codes radically different in various respects, but with the general policy of limiting the rent that a landlord can collect, restricting his right to recover possession of premises at the end of a lease or during the term created, among others. In Nigeria, prior to the enactment of the Land Use Act 1978, leases and tenancies existed in contradistinction to freehold estates in land, in terms of duration and tenure, ranking next to freehold interests. The reduction of all interests in land to a right of occupancy by the Land Use Act marked a paradigm shift in nomenclature and largely tenure. Under the present system of landholding in Nigeria, a right of occupancy has the semblance of a lease while the leasehold interest is akin to a sublease. An assignment of a lease implies an assignment of the residue of the term while a transfer of a measure of same is known as an underlease. While the new forms of estate that can be created under the Land Use Act may be strange to the English Lawyer, the nature of leases and tenancies, the obligation of the parties thereto, and the mode of termination of same, among others, are still governed by the old common law principles and rules either in their original form or as modified by local statutes. The paper reveals that the law of landlord and tenant in England has evolved much more than where it is in Nigeria. The affinity between Nigeria and England, should encourage Nigeria to take advantage of robust developments in England, such as the duty on landlords not to engage in retaliatory evictions, the obligation on residential landlords not to let premises to illegal immigrants, and the liability of landlords for certain anti-social behaviour of their tenants. The device of ‘break clauses’ gives additional rights to landlords to recover demised premises earlier than anticipated. The paper addresses the dire need to check the activities of illegal immigrants across Nigerian borders and the residency status of persons in volatile areas like the North East region and certain hotspots in the North of Nigeria, as well as the menace of so-called Fulani cattle herders wreaking havoc in Nigerian Communities by legislation that imposes checks on landlords in the affected areas in allowing non-Nigerians to reside in their premises.