BEYOND BREAKDOWN: REASSESSING THE GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE UNDER NIGERIA'S MATRIMONIAL CAUSES

Abstract

Nigeria’s Matrimonial Causes Act (“MCA”)¹ is routinely described, in both judicial and academic commentary, as having replaced an older matrimonial offence regime with a modern, unified “breakdown” principle: a marriage may be dissolved once it has broken down irretrievably. This article argued that the description is only half accurate. Section 15(1) does indeed name irretrievable breakdown as the sole ground for divorce, but section 15(2) then confines proof of that breakdown to eight enumerated facts, nearly all of which require the petitioner to attribute specific fault-like conduct to the respondent. The result is a statute that speaks the language of no-fault divorce while operating, in the overwhelming majority of contested cases, as a fault-based system in substance. The article argued that a Single Statutory Ground, Proved Through Eight Fault-Based Facts, Still Falls Short of a True No-Fault Divorce Law. Drawing on the text of sections 15, 16, 17, 18, and 26 to 30 of the MCA and on the Nigerian case law construing them, including Damulak v Damulak, Ibrahim v Ibrahim, Bibilari v Bibilari, and Ekrebe v Ekrebe, this article traces how the statute’s closed list of facts channels genuinely no-fault separations into adversarial, fault-narrating litigation, and compares Nigeria’s position with England and Wales’s move to a true no-fault model under the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020, itself a legislative response to the widely criticised Supreme Court decision in Owens v Owens. It closes by proposing statutory reforms that would allow Nigerian couples to prove irretrievable breakdown without first constructing a legal narrative of blame.