bad faith

Here is a mistake many people make without knowing it. They pay their premiums faithfully for years, file the paperwork away, and assume that when trouble comes, the insurance company will simply do the right thing because that is what they signed up for. They never read the claims process, never ask what counts as proof, and never consider that the company itself might become the obstacle.

Then the day comes. A fire guts a shop in Aba, a car is written off on the Lagos Ibadan expressway, or a mother in Leicester waits for her husband's life policy payout after his funeral. The claim goes in. And instead of a cheque, the family gets silence, endless requests for documents already submitted, or a sudden excuse buried in fine print nobody explained at the point of sale.

That refusal to deal fairly, when the insurer has no real basis to deny or delay, is what the industry calls bad faith. It is different from a genuine dispute over facts. An insurer that asks reasonable questions or takes time to verify a claim is doing its job. An insurer that stalls, invents reasons, lowballs a payout it knows is owed, or hopes the customer gives up out of exhaustion, has crossed into bad faith.

Nigerian regulators and courts increasingly recognise this, and NAICOM has pushed insurers to settle claims within set timelines precisely because delay has been used as a calm weapon for too long. In the UK, the Financial Ombudsman Service exists partly to catch insurers who try this, giving policyholders somewhere to complain when a company will not budge.

The lesson is not to distrust every insurer on sight. It is to know your policy, keep your documents, ask for reasons in writing when a claim is refused, and understand that the law is usually on the side of the honest claimant, not the company hoping you will walk away tired.