In the absence of a will, a once-close family could disintegrate and descend into a violent and bitter conflict over late parents’ assets. Siblings at daggers drawn turns what should have been a grieving process into a gruesome fight for inheritance, with bloodshed marking the bitter struggle, writes GODFREY GEORGE “While our father’s body was still in the mortuary, my younger brother started selling off all his lands,” recounted Jonah Justice, as the audience looked on in astonishment. “Before we could grasp what was happening, some people had come to take over the family house because, according to them, he had sold it.
” Justice, 29, was a guest at a conference for firstborns organised by a non-governmental organisation, Voices of Peaceful Transfer of Assets, which champions the need for will-writing among young adults. As a young lawyer, Justice found himself thrust into adulthood prematurely after his father passed away when he was just 22. His younger brother, then only 19, became a source of distress and conflict in what he had hoped would be a smooth transition of their father’s assets.
With only the two of them left in the family, Jonah had anticipated that managing their father’s estate would be a cooperative and peaceful process. Instead, he was met with stiff opposition, betrayal and turmoil. Their mother, Eunice, a retired nursing officer with the Plateau State Ministry of Health, was engulfed in grief and struggling to cope with the loss of her hu.