Ayomikun Kuewumi (Adekunle Ajasin University) has posted Messages, Receipts and Handshakes: The Formation, Proof and Enforceability of Informal Commercial Agreements among University Students in Nigeria on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Nigerian university campuses host a vibrant informal commercial economy in which students buy and sell clothes, phones and other goods, and render services such as photography, catering, event planning, logistics, agency, tailoring and short-let accommodation to one another, frequently for substantial sums of money. These transactions are rarely reduced into professionally drafted contracts. Instead, they are concluded through WhatsApp and Instagram exchanges, verbal promises sealed with a handshake, bank transfers, invoices and receipts, and informal understandings shaped by the customary practices of student commerce. This essay interrogates the extent to which Nigerian law recognises and gives legal effect to these informal modes of dealing. It organises the inquiry around three connected questions that track the life of a transaction, which are formation, proof and enforceability. On formation, the essay applies the orthodox common law ingredients of offer, acceptance, consideration, intention to create legal relations and certainty of terms to informal student transactions, drawing on Nigerian authority to demonstrate that Nigerian contract law is, as a matter of substantive principle, indifferent to form that an agreement need not be written, signed or witnessed to bind the parties to it. On proof, the essay turns to the Evidence Act 2011, as amended in 2023, and to the restrictive approach the Supreme Court has taken to the admissibility of computer-generated documents, to argue that whatever leniency the substantive law shows toward informal dealing is substantially narrowed by technical evidential thresholds that most student litigants neither know of nor are able to satisfy. On enforceability, the essay examines the remedies available for breach, the practical difficulties of enforcing claims against peers who disappear, deny liability or block communication, and the relevance of small claims mechanisms as accessible fora for the kind of low-value, high-frequency disputes that characterise student commerce. The essay’s central argument is that a real and consequential gap exists between the permissive posture of Nigerian substantive contract law and the restrictive posture of Nigerian evidential law and civil procedure, and that this gap, rather than any inherent deficiency in the underlying transactions, is what most often defeats genuine student claims. The essay closes with recommendations directed both at law reform, particularly the simplification of the certification regime for routine electronic records, and at practical guidance for student entrepreneurs on structuring informal transactions so that they remain provable and enforceable without requiring students to abandon the very informality that makes campus commerce work.
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