While contributing to Nigeria’s constitutional debates after the civil war, Obafemi Awolowo argued in his 1970 work, ‘The Strategy and Tactics of the People’s Republic of Nigeria’, that “to keep Nigeria one is not an end in itself, but a means to great national ends, goals, and targets.” He warned that national unity would remain fragile unless anchored in concrete socioeconomic objectives that improve everyday life. This reasoning shaped the inclusion of the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy in Nigeria’s 1979 Constitution, now Chapter II of the 1999 Constitution. These provisions articulate a vision of social justice, economic equity, and national cohesion whose continued neglect has left the promise of unity and development unrealised.
Chapter II defines what the Nigerian state exists to deliver in practical terms. It commits the government to ensuring adequate education, accessible healthcare, living wages, humane working conditions, social security, environmental protection, and equitable distribution of national resources. Rather than operating as a set of enforceable rights, it was designed to function as a policy compass, guiding legislation, budgeting, and development planning toward improving the material conditions of citizens and strengthening the social contract.
However, this constitutional socioeconomic mandate has long been dismissed as an assortment of “pious hopes”, noble in language but ineffective in practice, largely because Section 6(6)(c) renders its provisions unenforceable in court. This scepticism is understandable. Legal discourse in Nigeria is dominated by black-letter reasoning, where provisions that cannot be litigated are treated as marginal. Moreover, these constitutional directives emerged during the global ascendancy of structural adjustment and fiscal retrenchment in the late 1970s and 1980s, reforms that delegitimised the social philosophy underlying the Constitution’s development obligations and promoted a minimalist state at odds with its developmental vision.
Global development thinking has since shifted. State-led investment in human capital, poverty reduction, and universal access to basic services once dismissed as statist excess, now forms the backbone of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The provision of Chapter II not only anticipated this shift but aligned closely with contemporary ideas of inclusive, resilient, and sustainable development. What Nigeria lacks, therefore, is not a development vision, but the institutional will to treat its own constitutional commitments as operational guides for governance and public policy.
Remaining trapped in debates about justiciability is increasingly unproductive amid Nigeria’s deepening social stress. In 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that 133 million Nigerians – about 63 percent of the population – were multi-dimensionally poor, facing deprivations in health, education, and living standards. UNICEF identifies Nigeria as having the world’s highest number of out-of-school children, while the World Bank links weak human capital outcomes to constrained growth. These conditions fuel youth disaffection, erode trust in democratic institutions, and weaken state legitimacy.
Once Nigeria recognises Chapter II not as a failed bill of rights but as its foundational development policy framework, a more pragmatic agenda becomes possible. The priority is embedding its socioeconomic commitments into national development planning. Although strategies such as the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan and the National Development Plan reference these constitutional obligations in their preambles, they rarely translate into binding expenditure frameworks or measurable outcomes. The 2016 effort by the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on the SDGs to map global goals to the constitutional objectives was a useful start, but the hierarchy must be reversed. Nigeria’s constitutional development mandate should be the baseline against which all national plans and budgets are assessed.
Equally important is governance. As a non-justiciable framework, its effectiveness depends on cooperative federalism rather than judicial enforcement. Conditional fiscal transfers tied to outcomes in healthcare, school enrolment, or social protection could incentivise alignment at subnational levels. Interstate compacts could also enable regional collaboration on food security, environmental protection, and public health, creating economies of scale for shared welfare objectives. Nigeria’s uneven development experience demonstrates that coordination, not policy intent, remains the enduring constraint.
Measurable socioeconomic objectives have deep intellectual roots in post-colonial statecraft. Éamon de Valera in Ireland and B.R. Ambedkar in India promoted directive principles as pragmatic tools for nation-building rather than ideological statements. In international development, Adebayo Adedeji, as head of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, argued that fiscal reform without long-term social commitments would entrench instability. None regarded such objectives as anti-market; they understood them as the institutional foundations of legitimate, resilient states.
The lesson for Nigeria is clear. There is no single pathway to realising its constitutional socioeconomic commitments, and debates over justiciability will persist. Comparative experience shows, however, that such commitments retain immense power to orient national policy even when courts remain on the sidelines. While India and Nigeria articulate the objectives as public goods to be directly provided by the state, Ireland depends on strong family-reliant pensions and social assistance to deliver them. These differences illustrate that directive principles can shape development through diverse institutional arrangements without undermining market systems or democratic accountability.
Nigeria’s Constitution already articulates a social purpose grounded in socioeconomic justice, introduced in response to civil war fragmentation and entrenched inequality. Taking this mandate seriously would restore coherence to national development planning and help rebuild the social contract between state and citizen. Activating it is a political and institutional imperative.
