The problem of justice in an African traditional and postcolonial experience: a theoretical exploration

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Periodical article

Title:	The problem of justice in an African traditional and postcolonial experience: a theoretical exploration
Author:	Ujomu, Phillip Ogo
Year:	2007
Periodical:	Orita: Ibadan Journal of Religious Studies
Volume:	39
Issue:	2
Pages:	41-75
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Nigeria
Subjects:	social justice inequality values
Abstract:	The endemic susceptibility of Nigeria's social and political life to injustices is due to the absence of a proper idea of justice that can underwrite the internal consistency and wider social and political consequences of the developmental process in society. This paper addresses the perennial problems of exclusion and inequity in the traditional and postcolonial ideas of justice in Nigeria and presents a conceptual framework for overcoming these problems. It is true that traditional African religiously ordained communalism in most parts of the country could not assure the people of some cultural security from the immanent collapse of values, and the expropriation of their lands. Yet, it is equally true that the takeover of the Nigerian value system by colonialism and its ideologies only replaced a suffocating but stable space with an exploitative, turbulent and discriminative one. This dilemma has led to the fundamental crisis of the philosophical and ideological basis of justice facing modern Nigeria. Ref., sum. [Journal abstract, edited]