Will a Tenant Still Pay Rent After a Quit Notice in Nigeria?

Rent and mesne profits are different things

Rent is what a tenant pays while the tenancy exists. Mesne profits are what an occupier owes for the period after the tenancy has been determined and they are still holding over, up to the day they actually give up possession.

The practical consequence is that once a valid notice has expired and the tenancy has ended, a payment for continued occupation is compensation for being kept out of your property. It is not rent under a tenancy, because on that analysis there is no longer a tenancy.

Landlords tend to find this pedantic until it costs them. Describing a payment as rent in your correspondence, your receipts, or your pleadings is the kind of thing an opposing lawyer will use to argue that you treated the tenancy as still running, which is exactly the argument you are trying to avoid.

Does taking the money cancel your notice?

This is the real question behind the search, and the fear is understandable. If accepting money after serving notice restarted the tenancy, every landlord would face a choice between getting paid and getting their property back.

The reassuring position from the Nigerian appellate courts is that accepting money after a notice to quit has been issued does not automatically waive the notice. The Supreme Court addressed this in Pillars Nigeria Limited v. William Kojo Desbordes, reported at (2021) 12 NWLR (Pt. 1789) 122. Waiver generally needs something more: an express agreement, or conduct that clearly shows the landlord intended to treat the tenancy as continuing.

Automatically is doing real work in that sentence. It means you are not doomed by having accepted a payment, not that you can be careless. A landlord who accepts a payment, describes it as rent for the next year, issues a rent receipt for a future period, and negotiates a renewal is building the other side's case for them.

• Accepting money after a notice does not by itself waive the notice
• Waiver usually needs an express agreement or clearly inconsistent conduct
• Do not describe post-notice payments as rent in writing
• Do not issue receipts covering a future rental period
• Say in writing what the payment is being accepted as
• Get your lawyer's view before accepting anything mid-proceedings

How mesne profits are worked out

Mesne profits are generally assessed on the yearly value of the premises, which means the landlord is not locked into the old rent as the measure. If the passing rent was well below market by the time the tenancy ended, the claim can reflect what the property was actually worth over the holding-over period.

That is a meaningful point for anyone whose tenant has been sitting on a rent set three or four years ago. It is also not a free hand: the figure has to be justifiable as the value of the premises, and a court will want to see the basis for it rather than a number that looks punitive.

Practically, the claim runs from the date the tenancy was determined to the date possession is actually delivered up, and it accrues day by day over that period.

What actually happens in practice

Most Nigerian landlords in this position are not trying to win a legal argument. They want the property back, or they want to be paid, and they would take either. The sequence that tends to work is unglamorous.

Serve a valid notice. Keep taking money, but be careful and explicit about what you are taking it for. Keep a continuous record of what was demanded and what arrived, with dates. Then let your lawyer decide whether to press for possession, for the money, or for a negotiated exit, with the full picture in front of them rather than a half-remembered one.

The landlords who come out of this badly are almost never the ones with a weak claim. They are the ones who cannot show what was served and when, or whose payment record is a scroll of bank alerts that nobody can turn into a schedule.

• Confirm the notice was valid for the tenancy type before relying on it
• Record the exact date the tenancy was determined
• Log every payment received after that date, with what it was accepted as
• Keep proof of service for the notice and for the seven-day notice
• Get a schedule of amounts due and received ready before instructing counsel

The record is the case

A mesne profits claim is arithmetic supported by evidence. You are telling a court that the tenancy ended on a specific date, that the occupier stayed for a specific number of days, that the premises were worth a specific amount over that period, and that a specific sum was received against it.

Every one of those is a date and a figure. If your record is a WhatsApp thread and a bank statement, someone is going to spend billable hours turning that into a schedule, and the schedule will have gaps that the other side will find.

This is the same evidentiary problem as an ordinary arrears claim, which we covered separately in our guide to producing a court-ready rent statement.

How Ledge helps

Ledge keeps a continuous ledger of what was due and what was received on each tenancy, with dates, so the schedule your lawyer needs is an export rather than a reconstruction.

The tenancy notice record sits alongside it: what was served, on what date, under which tenancy type, with the notice period applied automatically. So the two things a mesne profits claim turns on, when the tenancy ended and what has been paid since, come from the same place and cannot drift apart.

This is record-keeping, not legal advice. Whether to claim mesne profits, and how to frame the claim, is a question for your lawyer. Our job is making sure the underlying numbers are not the weak point.

• A continuous record of amounts due and received, with dates
• The tenancy notice record: what was served, when, under which type
• Notice periods applied by tenancy type rather than counted by hand
• An exportable statement your lawyer can work from