MzAgams

For more than three decades, my life’s work has revolved around women, justice, and the truth about power in Nigeria.

I have lived it.
I have survived it.
I have fought it—inside courtrooms, inside institutions, inside communities, and inside myself.

I became a divorce and family law practitioner in the early 1990s, long before domestic violence was recognised as a public issue, and long before sexual harassment became something organisations had to answer for. My journey has taken me through hundreds of cases involving marriage, child custody, maintenance, property, domestic violence, abandonment, coercive control, and every shade of sexual and gender-based violence you can imagine.

Long before social media made these stories viral, long before “GBV” became a development term, I was documenting, analysing, litigating, and advocating.

My Lived Story

My expertise is not only professional—it is personal.

I experienced teenage pregnancy, early marriage, and the brutal reality of divorce and custody battles at a time when the law was harsher, society was crueller, and support systems were nearly nonexistent.

The Nigerian courts became my classroom.
My scars became my training.
My survival became my calling.

I learned the law because I needed it.
I teach the law because women still do.

The Work: Research, Advocacy, and Systemic Change

Since 2002, I have been involved in research on the prevalence and incidence of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, and harmful traditional practices. This includes:

• field research with survivors across Nigeria
• policy advocacy
• capacity-building with civil society
• training police, social workers, lawyers, and judges
• contributing to reforms in sexual harassment and safeguarding practices in institutions

I worked at the Women’s Crisis Centre and other frontline organisations where I saw the raw, unfiltered realities Nigerian women face daily. I learned the patterns—legal, cultural, digital, structural—and I learned where the system breaks.

MzAgams: My Voice, My Cases, My Truth

Out of these years of work, I created the MzAgams blog, a brutally honest, humour-infused, no-nonsense space where I tell the stories the courts don’t record:

• the woman who “forgot” child support for nine years
• the husband who weaponised poverty
• the educated woman who didn’t know she had legal rights
• the quiet ways patriarchy operates digitally, socially, and institutionally

MzAgams is not theory. It is not development-speak. It is the Nigerian woman’s lived reality, written by someone who has walked the terrain.

My Expertise: Deep, Lived, and Proven

Over 30 years, my legal work has spanned:

✔️ Divorce, custody & maintenance litigation
✔️ Customary & statutory marriage systems
✔️ Domestic violence & coercive control cases
✔️ Rape & sexual assault research and advocacy
✔️ Safeguarding & sexual harassment policy development & reforms (local and global)
✔️ Digital violence, online abuse & evidence preservation
✔️ Human rights & gender policy work (local & global)
✔️ Capacity in gender, women’s empowerment & participation
✔️ Access to justice, sufficiency of protection & institutional discrimination

This 16 Days Campaign is not something I am doing because the calendar says so. It is the work of a lifetime.

Why I Speak

I speak because silence kills.
I speak because legal literacy saves.
I speak because Nigerian women deserve rights, protection, and justice—not eventually, not theoretically, but now.
I speak because I’ve lived the consequences of ignorance and the liberation of knowledge.

This has been my life’s work.
And the next 16 Days I decided it’s time to share some of my knowledge.

There will be a new posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn each day from 25 November to 10 December 2025. Follow me for the full series. Here on WordPress I’ll just post a couple long form essays and case studies and a weekly roundup of comments from other posts so as not to clog up your inbox too much. I still remember my promise.

(Sorry. Changed my mind. I’m posting here daily. I want to keep the issues on your mind. That’s the whole point of the 16 Days of activism. Stayed Tuned.)