Nigeria does not lack a development vision. It lacks the discipline to be ruled by the person it has already chosen. Its constitution contains a clearly expressed social mandate that defines the material purpose of the Nigerian state: ensuring education, health care, decent work, social security, environmental welfare and equal access to national resources. Over time, this mandate has been reduced to rhetorical embellishment, formally enforced but ignored in practice. As poverty increases and social trust declines, Nigeria's challenge is no longer ideological. It is institutional and political.
This constitutional social mandate was born out of crisis. After the civil war, Nigeria's leaders understood that unity could not rest on symbolism alone. National unity requires concrete improvements in everyday life. Therefore, the state, at least on paper, committed itself to a developmental objective based on social justice and shared prosperity. That commitment remains formally intact. However, its continued neglect has given rise to a governance culture that treats development outcomes as optional rather than fundamental.
At its core, this social mandate defines what government success should look like in practical terms. It obliges the state to manage national wealth in ways that prioritize human capital, protect labour, reduce inequality and expand opportunity. It was never intended to serve as a list of court rights. Rather, it was designed as a policy compass, intended to guide legislation, budgeting, and long-term planning toward improving living standards and strengthening the social contract.
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Dismissing it as a mere aspiration depends largely on legal technicalities. Since these commitments are not directly enforceable in court, they have been considered politically expendable. This narrow study reflects a broader governance problem: Nigeria has often confused legal enforceability with policy relevance. Anything that cannot be prosecuted is considered non-binding, even if it defies the purpose of the state.
That dismissal was reinforced by the global intellectual climate of the 1980s and 1990s. Structural adjustment programs privileged fiscal restraint, market primacy, and a reduced social role for the state. Developmental disabilities were redefined as disabilities. Nigeria internalized this logic without double-checking whether it was compatible with its own constitutional settlement. The result was a persistent contradiction: a constitution that promises social welfare and a policy regime that finds it fiscally inconvenient.
Since then global thinking has moved forward. State investment in education, health and social protection, once derided as statist excess, is now seen as essential for development, resilience and stability. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals reflect this consensus. The irony is that Nigeria's constitutional social mandate had anticipated this change decades earlier. Therefore, the problem is not that Nigeria lacks a modern development framework, but that it refuses to implement its own development framework.
The cost of this refusal is no longer abstract. Multidimensional poverty now affects the majority of Nigerians. Education outcomes remain fragile, with millions of children deprived of formal schooling. Weak human capital is hampering productivity and growth. These conditions are not just social failings; They are a failure of governance. They undermine legitimacy, promote insecurity and undermine democratic consensus.
The debates that remain over whether these constitutional commitments are justified are increasingly missing the point. Courts are not the only means of accountability in a constitutional democracy. Where judicial enforcement is limited, the political, financial and administrative machinery must compensate. Treating the social mandate as non-operational because it is non-justiciable has allowed governments to avoid responsibility while maintaining a constitutional appearance.
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A more practical approach begins by placing this social mandate at the center of national planning. Development plans regularly reference constitutional objectives in their preamble but rarely translate them into binding priorities, expenditure standards or measurable results. This reversal must change. National plans and annual budgets should clearly be evaluated against the social responsibilities of the state, and not just against macroeconomic goals. Education access, health care coverage, housing adequacy and income security should serve as core performance indicators, not aspirational footnotes.
Fiscal federalism is equally important. Because these obligations go beyond federal, state, and local responsibilities, coordination, not litigation, is the decisive hurdle. Conditional financial transfers tied to outcomes in school enrollment, primary health care, nutrition, or social protection would align incentives at all levels of government. States that bring measurable improvements should be rewarded with greater fiscal flexibility, while persistent poor performance should trigger corrective oversight.
Regional cooperation also provides underutilized potential. Interstate agreements on food safety, environmental management, and public health can pool capacity, reduce duplication, and address problems that bypass administrative boundaries. Nigeria's uneven development record is less a failure of ideas than a failure of coordination.
Comparative experience confirms this view. Countries that adopted similar prescriptive social commitments did not regard them as ideological declarations. In India, they shaped welfare expansion through various institutional routes. In Ireland, they informed a social protection model adapted to the national context. In each case, the principles serve as anchors for policy coherence rather than constraints on markets or democracy.
The Nigerian debate often assumes a false binary: that social commitments jeopardize fiscal sustainability or private enterprise. The evidence suggests the opposite. Weak human capital, fragile health systems and deep inequality create long-term economic costs that markets alone cannot fix. Social investment, when well controlled, expands productivity, stabilizes society, and reduces the financial burden of crisis management.
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Therefore, the deeper issue is one of political will. To activate Nigeria's social mandate, governments must recognize that legitimacy depends not only on electoral cycles or macroeconomic indicators, but also on whether citizens experience tangible improvements in their lives. This will require a shift from symbolic constitutionalism to performance-based governance.
The Constitution of Nigeria already answers the question of what the state is to do. The challenge facing the country is whether it is prepared to govern as if the North still matters. Reclaiming this forgotten social mandate will not solve every problem overnight. But it would restore coherence to development policy, discipline public spending, and begin to rebuild a social contract that has been destroyed by decades of selective implementation.
Unity, as Awolowo warned, was never an end in itself. Its objective was to provide a better life. That promise remains unfulfilled, not because it was poorly conceived, but because it has been consistently ignored.
