Toward a Jurisprudence of Reparations for Historical Injustice in Nigeria: Slavery, Colonialism, and Structural Disadvantage

This doctoral research develops an original jurisprudence of reparations for historical injustice in Nigeria, engaging with the legal, political, and philosophical dimensions of claims arising from the transatlantic slave trade and British colonial rule and their ongoing structural consequences for Nigerian society. The global reparations discourse has intensified since 2020, with the CARICOM Reparations Commission model and growing African Union diplomatic engagement providing contemporary policy contexts. Yet a rigorous jurisprudential framework for reparations in the Nigerian context, grounded in international human rights law, international law on state responsibility, and African political philosophy, remains absent from the literature. The research draws on Yamamoto's interracial justice framework, Anthony Gifford's reparations jurisprudence, the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, and the ECOWAS Court of Justice's evolving reparations jurisprudence to construct the theoretical framework. A doctrinal methodology engages with customary international law norms on state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts and their temporal limitations, examining whether the slave trade and colonial exploitation generated reparable legal wrongs under evolving international law. The dissertation advances an original Structural Reparations Theory (SRT) for Nigeria that reframes reparations away from individual compensation toward transformative structural investment in the most colonially disadvantaged regions and communities, funded through a proposed Nigeria-UK Structural Transformation Reparations Compact. The SRT constitutes a major original contribution to global reparations jurisprudence with Nigerian and African specificity. Keywords: reparations, historical injustice, colonialism, slavery, Nigeria.