Before you promise your partner that you are going to marry him or her, I want you to know that failure to fulfill that promise of marriage carries huge legal consequences, it does not matter that you made that promise out of a joke or you were not serious when you made that promise, in as much as you have made the promise to marry a person you are under strict legal obligations and you must fulfill that promise of marriage, failure to do that will put you in the law harm’s way.

A promise to marry is seen in law as a contract which can either be oral, expressed or written and breach of a contract attracts consequences against the person who committed the breach and this is also applicable in the breach of the contract of promise to marry. Even if it is a love story gone wrong, it is first regarded as a contract in law and contracting parties must live up to the contractual terms.

Promise to marry is legally binding on both parties in as much as the parties meet up the legal criteria of making such a contract which is the ages of the parties is very crucial and there must also be consideration furnished  for it to be legally enforceable.

In the case of Mabamije V. Otto (2016) LPELR 26058 (SC) Mr. Otto promised to marry Ms. Mabamije but he didn’t fulfill the promise. Ms. Mabamije sued Mr. Otto for the beach of the promise, she claimed 20 million Naira as damages, she also prayed the court for an order to compel Mr. Otto to fulfill the promise of marrying her.

She  won the case at the high court but case went on to Supreme Court, although Ms. Mabamije lost the case at the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court due to technicalities of the law of estoppel (which we may not go into details today) but the courts emphasized that promise to marry is a contract and parties must live up to the contract  terms and breach of that promise carries legal consequences.

Also, in the case of Miss Chinye A.M. Ezennah v. Alhaji Mahmoud I. Atta 3PLR (2004) 40 (SC) popularly quoted as Ezennah v. Atta, the Supreme Court per Niki Tobi Jsc stated inter alia “…. an agreement or contract to marry is a bilateral affair between a man and a woman, both parties must be ad idem in respect of any collateral transaction relating to the intended marriage and breach of that promise is enforceable against the person who breached”. 

Tekedia Mini-MBA alumni run many meetings and hangouts across African cities. Weekly, many are forming companies, executing strategic partnerships, and doing many great things. Our members in this year have unlocked close to N1 billion credit via Bank of Industry (BOI). I am not aware of any institution in Nigeria that prepares its members to unlock value at that level.

To our Port Harcourt alumni, I want to send my greetings as you formalize your chapter. I will connect LIVE via Zoom; thanks for the invitation.

Registration for the next edition of Tekedia Institute Mini-MBA has since opened. Register and join us

Contact Nnamdi Odumody if you have questions on the hangout. He will connect you with the chapter leaders.

We are in the final week of Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 6 after 12 weeks. It has been a wonderful journey with all co-learners and faculty. Here are the programs for this final week.

At 7pm WAT today,  Tekedia Live will focus on “The Call to Business Execution”. Largely, it is ACTION time and we need to go to the markets, and apply the constructs, capabilities and frameworks we have mastered. Until it is done, it has not been done!

How do we get things done? How do we execute in markets? 

• Thur, Dec 2 | 7pm – 8pm WAT  | The Call to Business Execution – Ndubuisi Ekekwe

Registration for the next edition of Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 7 – May 7, 2022) continues. It is $140 (or N60k) for the 12-week program which is self-paced and wholly online. Join us here.

The African tech ecosystem has witnessed a significant leap in recent years. The burgeon has been pillared by the fintech sector that has attracted more than $2.5 billion in investments in 2021 alone. But recently, transport startups have been revving to fintech, raising millions of dollars in funding.

Algerian ride-hailing startup, Yassir, has announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round to build an African Super app.

The investment round was graced by notable investors and VCs such as WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, Quiet Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital and Moving Capital. Also participating are angel investors such as Cleo Sham of Uber; Thomas Layton of Upwork, Opentable and Metaweb; Rohan Monga of Gojek; and Hannes Graah of Spotify and Revolut.

This is coming a few weeks after Nigeria’s shared-mobility startups Treepz and Shuttlers raised $1.6 million seed each to expand their services in Africa.

Yassir was founded in 2017 by CEO Noureddine Tayebi and Mahdi Yettou as a ride-hailing business, designed to serve densely populated places that have been impacted by inefficient transportations. But it has since then onboarded a host of other services including last-mile delivery services, creating an ecosystem of related services bringing drivers, couriers, merchants, suppliers and wholesalers and individual users on one platform.

Tayebi says the plan is to use the marketplace model to offer payment services to all parties involved and create a super app in the process.

The company says it intends to use the new funds to consolidate its growth in its existing markets by launching new products and improving existing ones. It also plans to increase its engineering team.

Tayebi told TechCrunch in an interview that the plan is to offer many service to the underserved.

“Our approach of solving the unbanked population problem is unique in the region by offering more of a ‘banking as a platform’ solution where daily services are at the heart of it all via a super-app marketplace.

“Such services not only build trust for all the sides of the marketplace but also use them as channels to offer these payment services, which we think is the approach that is most suited to the region. Most of our competitors are either on-demand services — ride-hailing or last-mile delivery only — or pure payment solutions. This gives us an edge over them as we build the network, the channels and the trust that are all key ingredients for the adoption of payment services at large scale,” he said.

Yassir was the first Algerian startup to get into the Y Combinator accelerator program (Winter batch) in 2020, receiving $150,000 in seed funding. It has recorded tremendous growth visible in its customer-base. Yassir now has more than 2 million users and 40,000 partners and is available in 25 cities across Algeria, Canada, France, Morocco and Tunisia and is continuously expanding.

The startup’s growth is gradually putting Algeria in the map of African countries pulling in huge investments from their tech ecosystems.