The Unrecognised Partner

She comes to the office with a plastic folder, and everything in it is true.

There are photographs from the ceremony, several with both sets of parents in them. There is a hospital card in his handwriting naming her as next of kin. There are school fee receipts, WhatsApp messages arranging a burial for his uncle, a letter from his employer addressed to her by his surname, and eleven years of utility bills for a house they both lived in. She has kept all of it, not because she anticipated this, but because she is the kind of person who keeps things.

She is not asking for sympathy and she has not come to complain. She has come with a single question, which she asks in a level voice: what is her position.

The honest answer begins with a correction. She has arrived believing she needs to be believed. Nobody in the matter disbelieves her. His brothers do not dispute a single fact in the folder; several of them appear in the photographs. What she needs is something else entirely, and the folder is not evidence of it.

(A constructed illustration. The pattern is ordinary; the person is not real.)

She is not asking to be believed. She is asking to be recognised. Those are different applications.

The sub-pillar above this page sets out the five statuses Nigerian law is able to read, and the fifth of them — the unrecognised household — is where this essay begins. Nothing in what follows softens that position. A partner without a recognised status has no share in an intestate estate as a partner, no claim under the matrimonial jurisdiction, and no priority in the grant of representation. That is the law, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

But “no status” is not the same as “no claim,” and the difference is the whole of this page.

What the law offers her is not a right arising from the relationship. It is a set of alternative doorways, none of which is about the relationship as such. Three of them ask her to prove something other than love: that a marriage in a recognised form actually took place; that she contributed money to the acquisition of an asset; or that a child of the deceased exists and is entitled. The fourth asks nothing of her at all, because it depends entirely on something he did while he was alive.

The first task in any matter of this kind is therefore not to build a case. It is to work out which doorway she is standing in front of — because they are pursued differently, they are proved differently, and one of them closes very quickly.

They are set out here in the order in which they should be considered, which is not the order in which they are usually attempted.

An honest page has to name the limits, because a claimant who does not know them spends money discovering them.

None of these routes gives her the position of a spouse on intestacy. She does not take a spouse’s share, and she does not acquire one by succeeding on Route Two or Route Three.

None of them opens the matrimonial jurisdiction. The court’s power to order settlement of property between spouses is exercised over spouses. Outside Route One, that door is shut and the question reverts to strict title and proof of contribution.

None of them gives her rights in the family house — property held by a family as a unit rather than by an individual. Living in it, maintaining it and raising children in it do not create an interest in it, however long the period.

And none of them makes her a person the process addresses on its own initiative. This is the limit that surprises people most. She is not refused information so much as never reached by the question: the bank writes to the administrator, the registry corresponds with the proprietor, the employer pays the nominee. A person with no recognised status has to insert herself into a process that is already running, and each insertion is an application.

And none of them is quick. Each of the first three is a contested process requiring standing, evidence, representation and time, in an estate that is being administered by someone else while the process runs. That is not a criticism of the courts. It is the ordinary shape of litigation, and it is the reason the fourth route is worth more than the other three combined.

Matters of this kind are usually lost long before they are argued, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits.

The first is the grant of representation. An intestate estate is administered by whoever obtains letters of administration, and the applicant is drawn from the recognised relations. Once the grant is made, the person holding it is the lawful administrator, and everything afterwards is an application to a board somebody else is already sitting at.

The second is that institutions act on their own records immediately and without inquiry. Banks respond to the person who produces authority. Employers pay death benefits to whoever is nominated in the file, and a nomination is not a will — it directs payment and confers no interest in the estate. Registries deal with the registered proprietor. None of these institutions is adjudicating anything; each is doing what its own record tells it to do, and each does it within weeks.

The third is that evidence degrades from the day of the burial. The witnesses to a customary marriage are elderly. Recollections harden into positions once a dispute has a shape. Documents are dispersed among relations acting in good faith. The strongest version of Route One exists in the first months and is never stronger again.

The fourth is possession, which is not a right but is a fact of considerable practical weight, and which is very often given up early by a person acting with dignity in the days after a funeral.

An estate does not wait for the merits. It is administered by whoever holds the paper while the merits are still being argued.

Turn the page around and look at it from his side, because that is where the problem is actually solved.

He was not careless. He was in a relationship the law did not know about because it was never asked to know, and every moment at which he might have regularised it was a moment when doing so would have implied that something was wrong. He did not decline to make provision. He deferred it, in the ordinary way, for twenty-two years.

What he needed was not a change in the law and not a certificate. He needed one instrument that made provision for a person by name rather than by status.

That is precisely what a trust does. A trust separates the person who benefits from the person who holds; it operates outside the estate; and the beneficiary establishes nothing about herself except that she is the person named. It does not marry anyone, it confers no status, and it does not require the family’s agreement. Sibling 09 of this cluster takes that instrument apart in detail, and the seven-step architecture in the set-up cluster is the build. The letter of wishes is what carries the explanation — who she is, what she did, and why the provision is what it is — to people who will read it after the only person who could explain has died.

A will does part of the same work more cheaply, and for many households it is the correct answer. Its limits should be understood: it operates only on what he owned, it leaves the family house and jointly-held property outside his gift, it is published on probate, and it can be contested by the same relations who would have contested everything else.

And none of it displaces the simplest step. Where a customary marriage exists and the state provides for its registration, register it. Where paternity is a fact, acknowledge it in a form that outlives the person acknowledging it. The instruments are for what remains after that — and something always remains.

The four routes in Act Two are what the law offers a household that did none of this. They are real, they are worth pursuing, and every one of them is more expensive than the thing that was skipped.

She spent eleven years becoming his wife in every way but one. The law reads only the one.