In a society where female children are not given their due rights as regards their inheritance, a reader, Abiodun, a 42-year-old woman, thinks she has the right to partake in the sharing of her late father's properties, despite insistence by some members of her family that female children are not entitled to such.
But 72% of Pulse Nigeria Poll voters
believe all children are supposed to have a share in their parents'
will, regardless of their gender.
Read Abiodun's letter here:
"My
name is Abiodun, a 42-year-old woman. I am married with three children.
I happen to come from a wealthy family where my late father inherited
great wealth and landed properties from his family which naturally,
should be shared amongst his children.
My
father had four wives and 26 children, with me being the seventh child
from the third wife. In all, we have 14 daughters from all the wives but
after the demise of my father 10 years ago, some of our family elders
have refused to give the daughters any portion of our father's property,
claiming that since we are women, we should not partake in what our
father owned.
Their idea is that we will
all get married and as such, we should not lay claim to anything out dad
owned. I must say that this position is not taken by some of them,
especially our blood brothers but the stingy ones have vowed to deal
with us traditionally if we insist we must get something.
When
my father was alive, he had divided some of his property amongst his
children but upon his death, the family chased us out. Even the shop I
had in one of my father's shopping complex was destroyed and my goods
worth millions of naira vandalized.
At
one point, we went to court but the court told us to go and settle it
within the family but all attempts to get what rightly belonged to us
were rebuffed.
My questions now are
these: is there anything wrong for a female child to get part of her
father's inheritance? Is there any law in Nigeria that says a daughter
has not right to her father's property?
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