Two eviction cases in Lagos reveal a pattern worth understanding: what happens when people engage with formal legal systems they were never taught to navigate — and what the consequences look like when they improvise. Emeka*, a property lawyer shares the full deets with CareerBuddy
On a morning in late February, a property manager entered an apartment in Lagos that had just been vacated following a weeks-long eviction process. The tenant had been given six months notice. She had requested two additional months when the date arrived. She had received formal legal notices, including a letter asserting the landlord's intention to recover the premises. She had, eventually, moved out.
A routine inspection of the property would reveal a shocker. You've probably heard of evicted tenants leaving something of a parting gift that covers their dissatisfaction. But what she left behind was not damage to the property. Nor was it an unpaid balance or a disputed caution deposit. It was a charm; red cloth tied to various objects, placed deliberately in a space she no longer occupied or legally owned any claim to.
The lawyer who managed the eviction, a Lagos-based property attorney who asked to be identified only as Emeka, heard the property manager's report and found it more amusing than threatening.
"I found it funny that she would do this after moving all her things out. Who exactly was she placing a curse on?"
First, Let's Understand How It Got Here
Emeka manages properties on behalf of landlords, and this particular situation had been building for a while before the charm made its appearance. The tenant was not new to the building. She had been there long enough to be described, in Emeka's words, as someone who "seemed like a reasonable person."
The eviction process started in February. As mentioned earlier, Emeka had served notice six months prior; the law requires far less, so this was generous. When the move-out date arrived, the tenant was not prepared to honour it. She wanted an extension.
What followed was three weeks of formal legal correspondence. Actual written notices here and a formally drafted lawyer's letter asserting the owner's intention to recover possession of the premises there. This is the due process, and the process, however slow it feels, is what ultimately worked. As is the end with most situations like this, the tenant moved out. But who leaves juju behind as a response to a perfectly legal process? Emeka doesn't care much about this.
"We threw it in the gutter," Emeka says. Simply. As you would.
She Probably Thought It Would Work. It Did Not.
When we asked Emeka what he made of the whole thing; the symbolism, the intent, the choice to do this after she had already left, he was thoughtful about it in the way that someone is thoughtful when they have also already found it hilarious.
"She probably thought it would give us no peace of mind," he said. "But she doesn't know that we don't feel threatened by it. When your landlord asks you to leave, you should leave. If you want to stay, there is a process for that too. You beg. You negotiate. You explain your situation. There is almost always room for a conversation if you approach it correctly. But this? This is not a conversation."
The charm, in other words, was a closing argument delivered after the case had already been decided. Which, philosophically, raises interesting questions about how people choose to deploy their last available move. But practically, it changed nothing.
The Real Problem Started Before She Moved In
"The biggest mistake landlords make is that they don't involve lawyers," Emeka says this plainly. "A lot of the drama with this tenant, and with others in that building, started because when the landlord finished building the house, he didn't involve a lawyer. So there was no standard tenancy agreement. Just a very naive document that didn't protect the landlord's interests or spell out consequences clearly enough."
The caretaker in place before Emeka got involved was, in his words, "quite incompetent." No proper documentation or structure in place. When problems came, there was nothing solid to fall back on, so every dispute became a fresh negotiation. The tenant sensed the looseness and leaned into it.
Landlords skip lawyers for two reasons, he says: they don't want to pay, or their agents convince them they don't need one. "Both reasons are wrong. And both are expensive later."
What Landlords and Tenants Both Get Wrong
The documentation failures run in both directions. Tenants make a specific, common mistake: they treat the apartment as theirs in ways that their tenancy agreement doesn't actually permit.
A frequent example is painting. "Does your tenancy agreement say you need written consent from your landlord before you paint? Because if it does, and you painted without asking, your landlord can use your caution deposit to repaint the apartment back to its original colour. And you will have no legal argument."
The fix is genuinely simple: send a message to your landlord. Get a reply. Keep the record. If the landlord says yes, that correspondence protects you when you're trying to recover your deposit. If the landlord says no, you know where you stand before you've spent money on paint.
This applies to any modification as well: renovations, fixtures, structural changes. Get the consent in writing. Document the correspondence. And this is not to say it's important because landlords are dishonest, but because memories are unreliable and relationships are likely to change.
