The Nigerian Clock Starts in a Foreign Court

The statute governing the enforcement of foreign judgments in Nigeria has been on the books since 1961, and its principal part has never been brought into operation.

Section 3(1) of the Foreign Judgments (Reciprocal Enforcement) Act provides that the Minister of Justice, if satisfied that substantial reciprocity of treatment will be assured as respects the enforcement in a foreign country of judgments given in the superior courts in Nigeria, may by order direct that Part I of the Act extend to that country. Part I is the registration regime, and section 4(1) is its timetable: a judgment creditor under a judgment to which Part I applies may apply to a superior court in Nigeria at any time within six years after the date of the judgment to have it registered.

Section 10 governs where no such order is in force. Notwithstanding anything else in the Act, a judgment given before the commencement of an order under section 3 applying Part I to the country where the judgment was given may be registered within twelve months from the date of the judgment, or such longer period as may be allowed by a superior court in Nigeria.

Six years is conditional. Twelve months and a discretion is the operative position.

Where the clock starts

Read section 10 for what it says about time rather than about reciprocity. The twelve months run from the date of the judgment. Not from the date it became enforceable at home, not from the date the debtor was located, not from the date somebody worked out that the assets were in Nigeria.

That reorganises the matter. The enforcement question here is not decided after judgment; it is decided by what was done before it. A claimant who spends nine months after judgment identifying assets has spent three-quarters of a window a Nigerian court may or may not extend, and an extension is a discretion — argued for, on evidence, not assumed by a foreign adviser who read the six-year figure in a summary.

None of this is a defect peculiar to Nigeria. Un-commenced provisions sit on the statute book of every common-law country, including the one that supplied the drafting, whose own procedural machinery is the subject of London Is a Procedure, Not a Place. What makes this one consequential is its subject. It converts recovery into a scheduling problem, and scheduling problems are lost long before anybody instructs counsel in Lagos.

The four gates between finding an asset and getting it back are set out in Tracing Is Not Recovery. Here one of them has a clock on it, and the clock was started by a court somewhere else.

The second boundary is a state line

Section 83(1) of the Sheriffs and Civil Process Act allows the court, on the application of a judgment creditor whose judgment remains unsatisfied, to order that debts owing to the debtor from a third person — the garnishee — be attached to satisfy the judgment, where that third person is within the State. Section 83(2) requires the order nisi to be served on garnishee and debtor at least fourteen days before the hearing.

Within the State is a federal country's internal geography, and it is why Lagos is a distinct question rather than a synonym for Nigeria. The location that matters is the garnishee's, not the debtor's, because what is attached is somebody else's obligation to pay.

Section 84 is the harder provision. Where money liable to be attached is in the custody or under the control of a public officer in his official capacity, or in custodia legis, the order nisi shall not be made unless consent is first obtained: from the appropriate officer in the first case, from the court in the second. Section 84(3) defines the appropriate officer as the Attorney-General of the Federation or of the State, according to which public service the office sits in.

The point made here is structural and no other. The section creates a category of asset whose attachment depends on a consent, and attaches no timetable to the giving of one. Nothing is said about how any office has exercised that function. What is available without saying anything of the kind is that a creditor's exposure to delay is partly a function of whose custody the money sits in, and that this is knowable at the outset.

The register discloses its own limit

The instrument is the Persons with Significant Control Regulations 2022, made by the Corporate Affairs Commission under section 867 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020.

A person with significant control is one who holds, directly or indirectly, at least five per cent of the issued shares or partnership interest, or exercises at least five per cent of the voting rights, or holds the right to appoint or remove a majority of the directors or partners, or exercises significant influence or control — defined as the ability to direct or materially influence the finances, financial policies, management, operations or structure, or to derive significant economic benefit. Five per cent is a lower threshold than the twenty-five that governs the European instruments.

Regulation 5 requires a person to notify the company within seven days of becoming such a person and the company to lodge the information with the Commission; regulation 5(3) reaches foreign corporate shareholders, requiring the particulars of the natural person who ultimately owns or controls them. Regulation 10 lists what the Commission makes freely available: full name, the dates control started and was declared, occupation, service address, nationality, the nature of the control, and a unique identifier.

Then regulation 11(3). Notwithstanding the Commission's own obligation to put accuracy measures in place, the burden of proving the accuracy of the information submitted rests on the reporting company. Regulation 12(1) reflects a defaulting entity's status as inactive.

So the register states its own limit on its face, which most do not. It records what has been declared by a party on whom the accuracy burden expressly sits. That is useful, because a declared position can later be contradicted, and it is not verification. What a filing structurally cannot hold is set out in What Filings Never Record.

The last gate is a document issued on the first day

A satisfied judgment is not yet a recovery. The proceeds have to leave.

Section 15(2) of the Foreign Exchange (Monitoring and Miscellaneous Provisions) Act requires the authorised dealer through which foreign currency or capital is imported to issue a Certificate of Capital Importation to the investor within twenty-four hours of the importation. Section 15(4) then guarantees unconditional transferability of funds, through an authorised dealer in freely convertible currency, for dividends or profits net of taxes, loan servicing where a foreign loan was obtained, and proceeds net of taxes on a sale or liquidation. Section 13 provides that foreign currency purchased from the Market may be repatriated and shall not be subject to any further approval.

The guarantee is real and statutory. It is also anchored to a certificate created at the moment the money arrived, by a private institution, on a twenty-four-hour clock, years before anybody contemplated a dispute. That is the shape of the jurisdiction: the instruments are serious, the bar that argues them is serious, and every gate is opened by something that had to have been done earlier.

Nigeria is also a travel-risk jurisdiction and is treated as one under Travel Risk Management. That is a separate discipline and nothing about it belongs in a piece on enforcement.

The useful comparison is not with a richer jurisdiction but with a differently designed one. What the Dubai Boundary Actually Divides describes a place where the enforcement crossing is a five-item checklist and the discretion sits on the far side of it; What a Riyadh Court Must Now Write Down, one that published the order in which its own reasoning proceeds. Nigeria published its timetable in 1961 and left half of it switched off.

Nothing above is legal advice, and no assessment is offered of any Nigerian institution, official or company; whether a judgment may be registered, and within what period, is a question for counsel in the relevant territory.

Where a matter turns on establishing who stands behind a Nigerian counterparty before anything is filed, that work sits under Corporate Intelligence & Investigations Group; the material that has to survive a court, under Litigation Support & Evidence.