Lack of Social Justice: The Challenge to Nigeria’s Development

Abstract

Nigeria has been widely perceived as a society that cannot afford the internally oriented social justice which is the societal blood stream or the substance of societal life energy. This is because of the sorrowful and brutish realties, especially the predominant crises of systemic inequalities, deprivation, lack of public morality, poverty and degeneration of human dignity. In our attempt to address this phenomenon, we employed documentary research method for gathering and analysing data while the Marxist Theory of Postcolonial State was used for the analytical framework. Nigeria’s Postcolonial experience with associated imperialist features were identified. They are incompatible with Nigeria’s indigenous cultural values necessary for cultivation and sustenance of social justice. The work recommends an alternative mode of production: restructuring of the economy along socialist line. Socialist transformation is the ultimate panacea for restoration of social justice and freedom from imperialist enslavement of the country, it would revive the political economy of the state to be oriented towards enhancement of indigenous cultural values as the key factor for real development that cannot take place in the context of foreign culture.