I. INTRODUCTION

In the predawn hours of Thursday, 29 May 2025, torrential rainfall overwhelmed local drainage and broke through an obstructed tributary of the River Dingi, sending a wall of water through Mokwa, a busy market town in Niger State. The Federal Government later confirmed that the disaster was not caused by any release of water from the Kainji or Jebba Dams, both of which remained structurally intact, and attributed the flood instead to extreme rainfall, aggravated by climate change, and to unregulated construction that had blocked natural drainage channels.1 The flood killed well over one hundred people within the first two days, a figure that continued to rise as search and rescue operations progressed, and displaced several thousand residents.2 The disaster was not without warning. Six weeks earlier, on 10 April 2025, the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency had published its 2025 Annual Flood Outlook, which specifically identified Mokwa Local Government Area, along with eighteen other local government areas in Niger State, as being at high risk of flooding that year. The Minister of Water Resources and Sanitation later confirmed publicly that many residents had failed to heed the warnings issued months before the disaster struck.3 This paper does not treat Mokwa as an unfortunate accident of nature. It treats Mokwa as a case study in governance failure: a disaster that a published, government-issued flood warning, timely drainage maintenance, and effective public communication could have mitigated. The central argument of this paper is that Nigerian law, properly read, already treats this kind of failure as a legal wrong capable of remedy by a court, even though the Constitution appears, on its face, to say the opposite.

The 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended) commits the Nigerian state to the pursuit of good governance. Chapter II, titled ‘Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy’, instructs government to act with transparency, accountability, popular participation, and respect for the rule of law, and, in section 14(2)(b), declares in plain terms that ‘the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.’4 Yet the Constitution appears, in the same breath, to withdraw this promise. Section 6(6)(c) provides that the judicial powers of the courts do not extend to any question of whether an act, omission, law, or judicial decision conforms with the objectives set out in Chapter II, except as otherwise provided by the Constitution.5 In simple terms, this means that a Nigerian citizen cannot approach a court and argue that the government has failed to provide good governance, and expect a remedy on that ground alone. Chapter II, standing by itself, gives the courts no power to act.

The orthodox conclusion drawn from this pairing of provisions is that good governance in Nigeria is a mere aspiration: a moral commitment with no accompanying legal force. This paper submits that the orthodox conclusion, while textually understandable, is incomplete. Good governance does not need to be enforced as a freestanding Chapter II right in order to be enforceable. Its substance, namely the practical requirements of protecting people from foreseeable harm, treating citizens with dignity, and exercising public power reasonably, is already guaranteed elsewhere in the Constitution, in the justiciable rights contained in Chapter IV, and in international human rights instruments that Nigeria has converted into ordinary domestic law. Where those instruments and provisions are engaged, section 6(6)(c) has nothing to say, because that section closes the door only to claims that rest on Chapter II alone. This paper develops that argument in five parts. Part II examines the constitutional and statutory framework surrounding section 6(6)(c) and the body of case law that has already begun to soften its effect. Part III shows how a governance failure becomes a rights violation once it crosses into Chapter IV. Part IV tests the argument against recent Nigerian evidence and against comparable experience in India, the United States, and South Africa. Part V proposes specific legislative reforms.

II. THE CONSTITUTIONAL AND STATUTORY FRAMEWORK

Two competing approaches to reading a constitution provide a useful starting point. The legal positivism associated with H.L.A. Hart treats a legal rule as valid, and therefore binding, simply because it was made through the correct procedure by the correct authority, regardless of whether the rule seems fair or wise.6 On a strict positivist reading, section 6(6)(c) is the final word: because the Constitution itself withdraws Chapter II from judicial review, the matter ends there. Ronald Dworkin’s rival theory of law as integrity asks judges to read a legal system not merely by its bare words but by the principles that best justify and make coherent sense of the system as a whole.7 On Dworkin’s approach, a constitution that names good governance as a state objective, and then proceeds to guarantee every citizen a right to life, dignity, and property, has already supplied the underlying principle from which a right to competent governance logically follows, even where no single section states this in so many words. Joseph Raz draws a further, sharper distinction between formal legality, meaning a state that simply follows correct legal procedures, and substantive legality, meaning a state whose laws and conduct actually deliver the rule of law’s underlying purpose, such as protecting people from avoidable harm.8 Raz’s distinction matters here because a state may satisfy every procedural requirement, passing the right laws and following the right processes, while still permitting its citizens to be killed by neglect that persons in authority could reasonably foresee. Such a state has not genuinely delivered the rule of law it claims to observe, even where it has broken no specific rule.

Chapter II is not, in any event, as tightly sealed off from the courts as section 6(6)(c) might suggest at first glance. Section 13 imposes on every organ of government, and on every person exercising legislative, executive, or judicial power, a duty to conform to, observe, and apply the provisions of Chapter II.9 Section 14(2)(b), quoted above, makes the welfare of the people the primary purpose of government, and this language necessarily informs how courts ought to interpret section 6(6)(c) itself, since a constitution should not be read in a manner that renders one of its own core commitments meaningless. In Attorney-General, Ondo State v Attorney-General, Federation10, the Supreme Court held that the duty imposed by section 13 may properly inform legislation enacted by the National Assembly to give practical effect to Chapter II objectives, even though Chapter II itself cannot found an independent cause of action. Niki Tobi JSC went further still in Federal Republic of Nigeria v Anache11, holding in unambiguous terms that the bar created by section 6(6)(c) is neither total nor sacrosanct, because the section itself is qualified by the opening words, except as otherwise provided by this Constitution. That qualifying phrase performs real legal work. It signifies that wherever another part of the Constitution provides a route into court, section 6(6)(c) does not block that route merely because the underlying grievance also touches on a Chapter II objective.

The decision most frequently cited as the definitive bar to Chapter II claims, Archbishop Okogie v Attorney-General of Lagos State12, is narrower than its reputation suggests. The Court of Appeal in that case denied only a freestanding cause of action grounded in Chapter II alone. It did not deny that the section 13 duty exists, nor did it hold that Chapter II can never assist in interpreting a right that is otherwise justiciable. That distinction leaves open precisely the indirect route this paper proposes: a claim built on a Chapter IV right, such as the right to life or the right to dignity, given fuller meaning by reference to what Chapter II requires of government. Ugwu v Ararume13 confirms this reading. The Supreme Court there reaffirmed that Chapter II cannot stand alone as a source of legal claims, but it did not foreclose the use of Chapter II’s objectives to inform how a Chapter IV right should be interpreted. That is a distinct, and entirely permissible, judicial approach.

A separate and independent route exists through international law. In General Sani Abacha v Fawehinmi14, the Supreme Court held that the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, having been enacted into Nigerian law by ordinary statute, is binding and enforceable in Nigerian courts notwithstanding Chapter II’s exclusion. The Charter’s justiciability rests on its status as an Act of the National Assembly, not on Chapter II at all.15 The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice built on this reasoning in SERAP v Federal Republic of Nigeria and Universal Basic Education Commission16, declaring the right to education under the African Charter justiciable and rejecting Nigeria’s argument that the right was merely a non-justiciable directive of state policy. The Court held that because the claim was founded on the Charter, a treaty obligation rather than a domestic constitutional directive, Nigeria’s internal classification of the underlying objective as non-justiciable could not defeat the claim. This judgment strengthens the present argument for two reasons. First, it confirms that Nigerian courts and regional courts alike already accept that the African Charter offers an independent statutory route around section 6(6)(c). Second, its patchy enforcement record, discussed further in Part V, shows why judicial recognition of a right is not, by itself, sufficient to guarantee that the right is respected in practice. The Charter’s Articles 21, 22, and 24 speak directly to governance standards: the right of peoples to freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources, the right to economic, social, and cultural development, and the right to a general satisfactory environment. Each provision supplies further textual support for treating good governance as a legally cognisable concern, independent of Chapter II altogether.17

III. FROM GOVERNANCE FAILURE TO RIGHTS VIOLATION

The argument developed so far shows that Chapter II is not entirely closed to judicial engagement. The next step is to show precisely how an ordinary governance failure, such as poor planning, ignored warnings, or unrepaired infrastructure, becomes something a court can act on. Where government neglects infrastructure that predictably costs lives, as in Mokwa, or fails to curb an insurgency that displaces ordinary civilians across Borno and Yobe States, the resulting harm is not merely an unremedied governance failure sitting outside the reach of the courts. It is, on proper analysis, a violation of the right to life guaranteed by section 33 of the Constitution and the right to human dignity guaranteed by section 34, both of which sit in Chapter IV, are fully justiciable, and remain untouched by the ouster in section 6(6)(c).18 Section 34 protects every person’s dignity and prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.19 Abandonment in a flood zone that the responsible agency already knew was dangerous, or continued survival in an overcrowded displacement camp without adequate food or security, falls comfortably within the kind of degrading treatment section 34 is intended to prevent.

The causal chain in Mokwa is neither speculative nor remote. The Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency, a federal government body, had already identified Mokwa Local Government Area as a high flood risk zone six weeks before the disaster occurred, and the responsible minister later confirmed that the warning was not adequately communicated to, or acted upon by, the residents who bore its consequences.20 A government that publishes a specific, credible warning of a foreseeable danger to a specific area, and takes no adequate further action to protect the residents of that area, has made a deliberate choice to allocate the resulting risk to people who have no realistic capacity to protect themselves. Section 33 does not merely forbid the state from arbitrarily killing people. Properly understood, it also requires the state to take reasonable steps to protect life from threats that are foreseeable and preventable, particularly where the state itself has already identified and published the relevant danger.

This positive dimension of the right to life, namely the proposition that a right may impose a duty to act and not merely a duty to refrain from acting, finds support in earlier Nigerian precedent. Ransome-Kuti v Attorney-General of the Federation21 recognised that fundamental rights under the Constitution can impose affirmative obligations on the state, and not merely prohibitions on state interference. Mojekwu v Mojekwu22 affirmed the duty of the judiciary to enforce constitutional values against practices that degrade human dignity, a duty that applies with equal force to harmful state inaction as it does to an actively discriminatory rule or custom. Read together with section 14(2)(b), which gives content to the reasonable measures required by defining the welfare of the people as government’s primary purpose, these authorities support the conclusion that section 33(1) treats every deprivation of life outside the sentence of a court, including deprivation caused by official neglect of a known and specific danger, as presumptively unlawful.

It is important to state plainly how modest the resulting remedy actually is. A court asked to recognise a claim of this kind need not order the government to spend a particular sum of money, or redesign national infrastructure policy from the bench. It need only declare that the violation occurred and order a specific, targeted corrective step, such as an infrastructure audit of the affected area, resettlement of residents from a demonstrated danger zone, or compensation for identified victims. This is a narrower and more familiar judicial task than a general order compelling the government to reallocate its budget, and it is a task Nigerian courts already perform routinely in ordinary Chapter IV litigation. Bad governance becomes actionable, on this view, the moment its consequences cross into a Chapter IV violation, without requiring any blessing from Chapter II.

IV. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

Nigeria’s governance indicators provide relevant background, though not conclusive proof, for the argument advanced above. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Nigeria 142nd out of 182 countries, with a score of 26 out of 100. This score was unchanged from the previous year, and was shared with Cameroon, Guatemala, Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, and Papua New Guinea.23 The Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s 2024 Ibrahim Index of African Governance placed Nigeria 33rd of 54 African states, with an overall governance score of 45.7 out of 100, listing Nigeria among the eleven African countries whose governance deteriorated most sharply over the preceding decade.24 Neither figure is dispositive of any individual legal claim, but both help to explain why the Chapter IV claims described in Part III are not academic hypotheticals. They describe patterns of neglect that independent, internationally recognised indices confirm are widespread rather than isolated.

Reports on internally displaced persons in Borno and Yobe States document systematic failures in camp conditions, including overcrowding, inadequate food supplies, and a documented failure by security forces to protect displaced civilians from further harm. These conditions implicate sections 33 and 34 directly, in the same manner as Mokwa. It is also worth noting that enforcement institutions in Nigeria are not wholly inactive. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission recovered more than ₦566 billion in cash, alongside over four hundred million United States dollars and more than 1,500 recovered properties, between October 2023 and September 2025.25 Yet Nigeria’s poor governance rankings have persisted despite this recovery activity, which suggests that enforcement without a workable route to judicial accountability changes comparatively little for the ordinary citizen affected by governance failure. Two illustrative cases show the specificity this paper’s argument requires. Mokwa presents an identifiable authority, NSEMA, a documented prior warning, a period of neglect, and a quantifiable harm, implicating both state and local government responsibility. Borno and Yobe present a harder case of concurrent federal-state duty, arising from the Boko Haram insurgency that has displaced civilians since 2009, compounded by camp conditions that independent human rights monitoring has documented. This is an attribution problem that Part V’s third recommendation is designed to resolve.

Comparative experience from three separate jurisdictions confirms that treating good governance as justiciable is a considered legal choice available to any constitutional order, and not a peculiarly Nigerian impossibility. India’s Directive Principles of State Policy are, under Article 37 of its Constitution, expressly declared non-justiciable, in language that closely mirrors section 6(6)(c).26 Yet the Indian Supreme Court has repeatedly read the Directive Principles into the justiciable right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, a development substantially assisted by standing rules far more permissive than Nigeria’s own. India’s public interest litigation tradition also emerged from a distinct, Emergency-era constitutional crisis with no direct Nigerian parallel, so the comparison is instructive but institutionally contingent rather than a straightforward transplant.

The United States achieves a comparable form of accountability without naming a constitutional right to good governance at all, through the ordinary operation of administrative law. The Administrative Procedure Act bars arbitrary and capricious agency action, and in Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association v State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co27, the United States Supreme Court applied that standard to require a federal agency to give a reasoned explanation, grounded in the evidence before it, before reversing a safety regulation. Nigeria’s administrative law does not yet impose an equivalent general duty of reasoned explanation on public bodies, largely for want of a general administrative procedure statute. This gap is the subject of Part V’s second recommendation.

South Africa supplies the closest comparative analogue to an express constitutional right to good governance. Sections 26 and 27 of its 1996 Constitution guarantee access to housing and health care, expressly made subject to the state taking reasonable legislative and other measures within its available resources.28 In Government of the Republic of South Africa v Grootboom29, the Constitutional Court found the state’s national housing programme constitutionally unreasonable because it made no provision for people in the most desperate need, while carefully declining to dictate how much money the state had to spend or precisely what the programme had to look like. The Court instead required only that whatever programme existed had to be reasonable, judged against the needs of the most vulnerable. This reasonableness model of review is modest and deferential to policy choices, yet still capable of producing a real remedy, and it is precisely the remedial approach that Part III of this paper proposes for Nigeria.

V. RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION

Three reforms follow from the gaps identified above, each addressing a specific weakness this paper has traced through the preceding parts.

First, because Part II shows that section 6(6)(c) bars only a freestanding Chapter II claim while leaving open the qualifying clause relied upon in Anache, the National Assembly should legislate an explicit statutory exception making clear that Chapter II neglect which proximately causes a Chapter IV violation is justiciable under Chapter IV. This would convert Niki Tobi JSC’s dictum from a persuasive judicial observation into settled statutory text, removing the uncertainty that currently allows some courts to read Okogie more broadly than its facts actually support.

Second, because Part IV found that Nigeria’s standing rules are considerably stricter than the rules that enabled India’s public interest litigation to succeed, and because Nigeria has no general administrative procedure statute of the kind that grounds judicial review under the United States’ Administrative Procedure Act, the Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules should be amended to designate governance-failure claims linked to documented, foreseeable harm as public interest litigation. In parallel, the National Assembly should enact a general administrative procedure statute requiring public bodies to give reasons for decisions bearing on life and dignity, so that Nigerian courts can undertake the kind of reasoned-evaluation review the United States Supreme Court applied in State Farm.

Third, because Part II noted that ECOWAS Court judgments have faced persistent executive non-compliance in Nigeria, and Part IV found that responsibility for concurrent federal-state duties, as in Borno and Yobe, remains constitutionally unresolved, Nigeria should legislate both a domestic enforcement mechanism for ECOWAS Court judgments and a statutory framework allocating liability between federal and state authorities. Without such a framework, a claimant in a case such as Borno or Yobe is left unable to identify with confidence which tier of government must answer for the harm suffered.

This paper has argued that a right to good governance in Nigeria does not depend on inventing a wholly new right. It depends only on reading the rights that already exist in the 1999 Constitution as a coherent whole. Section 14(2)(b) makes the welfare of the people the primary purpose of government. Sections 33 and 34 guarantee life and dignity in terms that are undisputedly justiciable. Section 6(6)(c), properly read, says nothing at all about claims that are genuinely founded on Chapter IV. The African Charter supplies a further, independent statutory route into court, and the decisions in Anache, Abacha v Fawehinmi, and SERAP v Nigeria together confirm that Nigerian and regional courts have already begun to move along the path this paper describes.

Two cautionary scholarly positions deserve a direct answer. Professor Nwabueze’s defence of non-justiciability, namely that a constitution must be permitted to record aspirations unsuited to direct judicial enforcement, says nothing against a claim that never actually leaves Chapter IV, since the claim this paper defends is not a freestanding Chapter II claim at all.30 Professor Osinbajo’s related caution, that declaring a right justiciable achieves little without a matching fiscal commitment, is best read as an argument for pairing judicial recognition with the legislative reforms proposed above, and not as an argument against recognising the underlying right. Mokwa was a disaster enabled by a form of neglect the law already prohibits. The displacement crisis in Borno and Yobe is a dignity failure that sections 33 and 34 already protect against. What both expose is not, in the final analysis, a genuine gap in Nigerian law, but a persistent reluctance to read that law, and now to reform it, as the coherent whole it was always intended to be.