Recent Sub-Saharan African Court Cases

Repaginated 7 October 2026: content unchanged. Pages 595-611 of Vol. 1 No. 2 (formerly 579-595). Repaginated 5 October 2026: content unchanged; pages 579-595 of Vol. 1 No. 2 (formerly 575-591), following the version 1.1.0 corrections to the Foundations entries 000 and 007–010.This installment treats six Sub-Saharan jurisdictions, selected deliberately rather than representatively. South Africa's Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, assented to in December 2024 but not yet brought into force, would give effect to a constitutional standard of just and equitable compensation and lists five circumstances relevant to striking that balance - current use, the history of acquisition and use, market value, the extent of direct State investment and subsidy, and the purpose of the expropriation - without weighting them; meanwhile the Supreme Court of Appeal, under the 1975 Act, treats market value as the starting point to which the constitutional assessment is then applied. Nigeria departs further: under section 29 of the Land Use Act no compensation is payable for the value of the land itself, the land component being a year's rent and improvements being assessed at replacement cost less depreciation. The Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies the control on that result, vesting the soil in the State as Nigeria does but measuring the indemnity by the value of the property at the date of the judgment on the regularity of the procedure, payable within four months on pain of annulment. Kenya values land by a statutory index and defines promptness as not more than one year after possession; its Land Acquisition Tribunal's decisions of 2025-26 are reported from the official texts, among them an award for injurious affection that put the loss of ocean frontage at half the value of the land left. Angola's Benguela court of appeal holds that a concession-derived right survives non-use until the administration declares it lapsed, and Ethiopia's formula, lease benchmark and one arbitral award complete the expropriation material. Decisions on rating, lending, valuer liability, family, estate, partnership and insurance follow, most of them Kenyan and South African.