A Critical Realist Theory of Anti-Corruption Law Failure in Nigeria: Structural Mechanisms, Agency, and Institutional Reform

Despite an extensive anti-corruption legal framework encompassing the EFCC Act, ICPC Act, CAMA, the Proceeds of Crime Act, and Nigeria's UNCAC obligations, corruption remains pervasive across all sectors of Nigerian public life. Existing explanations for anti-corruption law failure in Nigeria focus on individual agency, cultural factors, or enforcement capacity gaps, without developing a theoretically rigorous structural account of the mechanisms that systematically reproduce corruption despite legal reform. This study applies Critical Realism to develop an original structural theory of anti-corruption law failure in Nigeria, identifying the deep structural mechanisms that generate corruption reproduction beyond the capacity of legal reform to address. The methodology combines Retroductive reasoning with a three-layer structural analysis (observable corruption outcomes, underlying governance mechanisms, and deep constitutional and political economy structures) drawing on mixed-methods data from EFCC prosecution records from 2003 to 2023, semi-structured interviews with 50 anti-corruption practitioners including prosecutors, investigators, and civil society advocates, and comparative structural analysis from Ghana and Rwanda. The study's original theoretical contribution is a Structural Mechanism Theory of Anti-Corruption Law Failure specific to federal petroleum-dependent democracies. Roy Bhaskar's Critical Realist Ontology and Institutional Corruption Theory provide the philosophical and theoretical foundations. Findings generate theoretically grounded institutional reform proposals targeting structural rather than agency-level anti-corruption interventions. Keywords: anti-corruption law, Critical Realism, structural theory, corruption mechanisms, Nigeria.