Postcolonial Theory and Nigerian Constitutional Law: Deconstructing the Colonial Inheritance in the Legal System

Nigeria's legal system bears the structural imprint of British colonial law, from the received common law doctrines and equitable principles to the institutional design of courts, the Attorney-General's constitutional role, and the land tenure system codified in the Land Use Act. A theoretically rigorous postcolonial deconstruction of how colonial legal inheritances are reproduced and naturalised in contemporary Nigerian constitutional law is absent from the existing public law scholarship, which has largely accepted inherited legal structures as normatively neutral. This study applies Postcolonial Theory to deconstruct the colonial inheritance in Nigerian constitutional law, identifying the specific doctrines, institutions, and interpretive conventions through which colonial power relations are reproduced in contemporary public law. The methodology combines a genealogical analysis of selected constitutional law doctrines from their colonial origins through their post-independence transformation, with Critical Discourse Analysis of Supreme Court judgments from 1960 to 2023 examining the reproduction of colonial legal language and reasoning, and comparative decolonisation analysis from India's constitutional jurisprudence. Frantz Fanon's Decolonisation Theory, Homi Bhabha's Colonial Hybridity Theory, and Makau Mutua's Human Rights as Savages-Victims-Saviours critique provide the theoretical foundations. The study's original contribution is a Postcolonial Deconstruction Method for Nigerian Constitutional Law applicable across common law African jurisdictions. Findings generate a theoretically grounded decolonisation agenda for Nigerian legal education and constitutional reform. Keywords: postcolonial theory, decolonisation, constitutional law, colonial inheritance, Nigeria.