Justice, restoration and reparations: a Nigerian perspective on addressing the precolonial, colonial and post-colonial economic legacies

1.1 Hypothesis

Based on the foregoing, we hypothesise as follows:

Africa’s, and by extension, Nigeria’s underdevelopment, is not merely the outcome of poor post-colonial governance, but the result of a historically entrenched global economic order rooted in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonial extraction, and post-colonial structural dependency.

Working from this hypothesis, we argue that reparative justice, understood as a combination of financial, institutional, cultural and legal measures, offers a legitimate and necessary framework to redress these harms and foster socio-economic restoration.8 Focused on the evaluation of Africa’s trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonial and post-colonial economic trajectory, this article unpacks the complex relationship among justice, restitution and reparations.

1.2 Methodology

Our methodological focus in this article is doctrinal, triangulated with, first, historical analysis through which the origins of Africa’s human and economic exploitation is traced, as documented in colonial documents, records, and historical scholarship.9 Second, focusing on Nigeria’s resource rentier economy, case study evaluation is adopted to reveal how extractivist policies have persisted post-independence, exacerbating inequality and environmental degradation.10 Third, we adopt a policy and legal analysis to critically review international legal frameworks and normative declarations recognising slavery and colonialism as crimes under international law and affirming reparations as both moral and legal obligations for African states.11

Presented as follows, part 2 highlights the theoretical and analytical frameworks of reparations, adopting a historical-structural approach to highlight the systemic nature of European economic and human exploitation, and its enduring impacts in Africa. In part 3, Nigeria’s historical experiences of trans-Atlantic slave trade through to the contemporary spectre of extractivism and unfair trade policies will be critically examined. Part 4 focuses on Nigeria’s strategic role in the larger African reparations debate and framework, starting with Abiola’s historical advocacy. In part 5, we propose a Nigerian model of reparations for Africa, including cultural and symbolic restoration, financial compensation and economic restitution, institutional reforms, educational initiatives and legal and policy frameworks. In part 6, we present our insights and conclusions from Nigeria’s strategic role in the broader African reparations framework.

Premised on an Afrocentric reading of the continent’s history, wrought with violence, exploitation and dispossession processes, we argue that Africa’s relationship with Europe needs to be rethought and reshaped on human, political, cultural and economic levels. This is because the relationship was originally marked, with insight from Beck, by what we argue as mental constructions that interpreted the processes as a rationale-derived Darwinian order. For Beck, this rationalises growth or multiplication as paramount, insofar as the competition for survival creates the selective pressure required for highly adapted creatures’ evolution, through a complex web of life with several forces pushing and pulling in different directions.12 Thus, we contend that Europe established on the continent, relations of dominance and subordination still currently maintained, albeit in transformed fashions. By leveraging Nigeria’s position as a continental leader, and seeking restoration, renewal and reparative justice, via the proposed reparations framework, it prioritises African agency and sovereignty.

2.1 Justice, restoration and reparations within Nigeria’s socio-economic context

The historical politico-economic structures established during colonialism, with their enduring impacts on Africa’s development trajectory, are crucial in mapping the evolution of Nigeria’s economic dependency. During the colonial era, they institutionalised an export-oriented economy, monocultural production and external regulation of trade routes.36 For Adedeji, these exploitative frameworks, embedded in the Minerals Ordinance of 1916, were systematic, cumulative and legally codified, not incidental, assuming complete control over subsurface resources.37 They have evolved, post-independence, into unfair trade agreements and debt regimes under the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s punitive conditionalities.38 They have also found their way into bilateral investment treaties (BITs), culminating in modern extractivism39 in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.40

Thus, to understand reparations within Nigeria’s context, it is essential to connect abstract principles of justice to concrete socio-economic realities by applying Rawls’s Justice as fairness as a compelling normative basis for reparations against historical injustices. Rawl’s ‘veil of ignorance’ and the ‘difference principle’41 apply to Africa’s reparations claims, both demanding justice that do not advantage any particular social position.42 We acknowledge that Rawls’s theory does not prescribe specific reparative policies; however, it provides a morally grounded framework for evaluating their legitimacy in pursuit of a more just and cohesive society. From behind the ‘veil’, rational individuals, unaware of their race or class, would likely endorse compensatory mechanisms that correct enduring disadvantages imposed by past discrimination.43 The ‘difference principle’ further obliges social and economic inequalities to benefit the least advantaged which, in a racialised context, may necessitate targeted redress for historically marginalised groups.44 It is for these reasons that we justify reparations not only as a response to past wrongs, but also as a forward-looking commitment to equity, stability and civic trust. Thus, justice implies accountability for historical and structural wrongs, particularly those that established patterns of exclusion and impoverishment.45 Restoration, on its part, requires not just symbolic apology but material, cultural and institutional recovery of what was lost or denied, including land, sovereignty, livelihoods and human potential.46 Flowing from these two concepts, reparations must therefore be both retrospective and forward-looking: addressing past harms while building equitable systems for the future.47

As we shall see in part 3, for Nigeria, justice, restoration and reparations take on specific meanings because in the Niger Delta, particularly, environmental degradation and economic deprivation, linked to oil extraction, demand ecological restoration and resource justice.48 In Northern Nigeria, the perpetual educational deficits and infrastructure gaps are traceable to colonial administrative neglect and post-independence deliberate underinvestment.49 Also, the imposition of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in the 1980s eroded public institutions and widened inequality, necessitating structural and economic reparations.50 These arguably gave impetus for local expressions of reparative demands as evidenced in the Ogoni Bill of Rights below, seeking

full right to (i) control Ogoni political affairs; (ii) use at least fifty per cent of Ogoni economic resources for Ogoni development; (iii) protect the Ogoni environment and ecology from further degradation; and (iv) ensure the full restitution of the harm done to the health of our people by the flaring of gas, oil spillages, oil blow-outs, etc ...51

These expressions of reparative demands, we argue, are not simply grievances, but legitimate justice claims embedded in both moral reasoning and international legal instruments, including the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter).

3.1 Trans-Atlantic slave trade: demographic collapse and socio-economic rupture

Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, Africa became one of the most brutal theatres of global slave trade.54 Over 12 million Africans were forcibly exported to the Americas. During this period, a significant proportion of them were drawn from the diverse societies inhabiting the territories now called Nigeria.55 To Europe, Africa functioned not as a partner in commerce but as a human quarry, an inexhaustible reservoir of bodies convertible into labour power.56 The young and able-bodied, who formed the backbone of agricultural productivity, defence and social reproduction, were torn from their communities.57 This demographic haemorrhage dismantled entire systems of production and kinship, leading to depopulated villages, abandoned farmlands and the erosion of complex political formations.58 By 1850, estimates suggest that some Nigerian regions suffered population declines approaching 50 per cent,59 a depopulation that was not merely numerical but civilisational. The fabric of lineage governance, apprenticeship systems and generational knowledge transmission was thus violently interrupted.60

These events profoundly altered the internal dynamics of Nigerian societies, with the Aro Confederacy in the Eastern region, for example, developing into a theocratic-commercial force that organised the human trafficking industry. According to Obienusi, it converted religious institutions into tools of economic pressure by using the Ibini Ukpabi oracle’s spiritual authority.61 Thus, the Aro trading network, stretching across the Igbo hinterland and into the Cross River basin, transformed political authority into a war economy, while the oracle’s decrees legitimised slavery.62 As survival became intertwined with complicity in violence, governance became militarised, thereby undermining community trust.63 However, the Aro example was not isolated as the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan circuits converged across the savannah and forest belts, entangling local economies in the global demand for commodities and slaves.64 The Wangara Trading Network, once the heartbeat of the trans-Saharan trade in salt and gold, as Ochonu accounts, experienced systemic destabilisation as European coastal and slave trade altered West Africa’s economic logic from production to predation.65 Thus, for Ochonu and Klein, the moral and economic underpinnings of networks such as the Wangara were weakened by European capital and weapons’ infiltration, creating an imbalanced equilibrium between trade and society.66

However, Siollun’s analysis of the purposeful economic architectures of British colonialism culminating in structural underdevelopment,67 helps us to put Nigeria’s reparations claims in sharper perspective. Siollun emphasises how the slavery epoch produced the conditions for colonial dominance, arguing that the core foundational ingredients of Nigeria’s existence and problems were laid68 during the colonial era. These include the inter-polity mistrust, social fragmentation and militarisation,69 which made the continent’s colonisation both feasible and convenient from an administrative standpoint. As he argues, the Nigerian Colonial Office’s priority was to minimise the financial burden to the British taxpayer, reduce bureaucratic duplication and maximise revenue because Nigeria was a page in a colonial accounting ledger.70 Therefore, the trans-Atlantic slave trade had completed the initial destabilisation task imperialism would use to build its political economy of control. Regretfully, the socio-economic effects persist; the slave trade normalised extractive logics by commodifying human life, resurfacing in colonial taxation and postcolonial oil economies.71 Gauging by Nigeria’s current socio-political and economic dynamics, it is evident that the internalisation of violence, rivalry, mistrust and the palpable psychological rupture are the after-effects of our ‘three epochs of injustice’. Therefore, for us, the trans-Atlantic slave trade is the root cause of Nigeria’s current structural underdevelopment.

3.2 Colonial economic policies of exploitation

It is undeniable that colonialism, taking a leaf from the slavery epoch, institutionalised and perfected the logic of extraction logic, with Nigeria becoming an economic appendage of the British Empire. To match Nigeria’s productive forces with Britain’s industrial appetite, the colonial economic policy was meticulously crafted between 1914’s amalgamation and 1960.72 While native processing industries were actively discouraged, cash crops such as cocoa, palm oil and rubber were given priority, with the colony continuing to serve as a market for British manufactured goods and a supply of raw materials.73 Punitively, participation in the colonial economy was imposed by taxation schemes such as the head and hut taxes, yet indigenous entrepreneurs were routinely and systemically excluded from markets and credit.74 However, British companies benefited from monopolistic advantages.75 Roads, ports, railroads and other infrastructure were also designed as conduits for resource extraction from the hinterlands to coastal export depots rather than as tools of national integration.76 Thus, as will be seen in the post-colonial extractivist analysis, the colonial state institutionalised inequality to guarantee Nigeria’s economy would continue to be externally orientated, technologically dependent and structurally incapable of autonomous growth.

3.3 Post-colonial spectre of extractivism

As noted above, Nigeria’s colonial architecture was not dismantled by independence; rather, only its administrators were replaced, with Nigeria effectively becoming the quintessential ‘rentier’ state after oil discovery in Oloibiri, Niger Delta. As Watts and others observe, the post-colonial state’s reliance on oil revenue entrenched neo-colonial extractivism, substituting crude oil for palm oil while maintaining the same external dependency.77 Over 90 per cent of export earnings and 80 per cent of government revenue accrued from oil by the 1970s78 through joint ventures between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and major multinational oil corporations,79 including Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Eni (Agip) and Total. Their operations, however, have wreaked havoc on the Niger Delta, resulting in ‘widespread, systematic contamination’80 of both land and water, as the 2011 UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report on Ogoniland highlighted. Once self-sufficient through farming and fishing, communities such as Ogoni are now in ecological and socio-economic ruin.81

To protest this structural violence, resistance groups such as Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) emerged, but were brutally suppressed; in 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni activists were executed.82 The persistence of dispossession is further demonstrated by the 2021 Petroleum Industry Act’s Host Community Development Fund, which allots only 3 per cent of operating costs83 to the oil-bearing communities. This implies for us that the Nigerian government, like its colonial forebear, prioritises elite capture and interests, and foreign capital over citizens’ welfare.

3.4 Contemporary unfair trade policies

As a continuum, the post-colonial global order entrenches historical inequalities via contemporary neoliberal trade and financial systems84 through which Nigeria’s economic subordination has persisted as exporter of raw materials and importer of finished goods.85 This is exemplified by the SAP imposed in the 1980s by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which exacerbated this dependency, promoting deregulation, privatisation and subsidy removal. These policies culminated in currency devaluation, inflation and a decimated social sector.86 What the neoliberal regime implies for Nigeria, and other African and Global South states, is that tariff structures maintained by the Global North impose high barriers on processed goods from them, while subsidies in Europe and the United States (US) allow their agricultural exports to flood Nigerian markets.87 Thus, Nigeria’s low or zero capacity for refining its crude oil forces it to export it and import the refined petroleum products at high cost, thereby compounding its trade deficits.88 This legacy of mono-product dependence, unfavourable trade terms and limited industrial capacity has equally left Nigeria vulnerable to global shocks and systemic underdevelopment.

Our stance is that the current unfair trade practices are not coincidental; rather, they are the reincarnation of past extractivist structures, emasculating both natural and human resources. We contend that while the trans-Atlantic slave trade commodified human labour, colonialism commodified land and crops; however, neoliberalism commodifies policy, dictating the parameters within which Nigeria must ‘participate’ in the global economy. From this, we stress that these three epochs of injustice are cumulative strata of a single process of the reproduction of dependency through restructured modalities of control rather than distinct historical phases. Thus, what has transpired is that neoliberal economy financialises and digitises the same reasoning. We therefore submit that development aid and apologies are insufficient forms of reparative justice. To address the historical continuum of extraction that started with the slave ships and continues in the cargo ships and capital flows of the twenty-first century, reparative justice calls for a drastic restructuring of international economic relations.

4.1 Historical contributions and the advocacy of Abiola

Chief Abiola’s activism, however, did not operate in isolation but was embedded within an intellectual tradition sustained by Nigeria’s historical scholarship. The reparations discussion gained conceptual coherence and historical weight through Professor Ade-Ajayi’s intervention as a member of the Group of Eminent Persons. Ade-Ajayi reinterpreted reparations as an epistemic repair project, a reclaiming of Africa’s intellectual agency and civilisational dignity,98 beyond just a financial demand. He placed the movement within the broader endeavour of decolonising African history itself by arguing that reparations must restore both material wealth and lost knowledge systems.99 This line of reasoning is still present in modern reparative theory, with scholars such as Savoy and Sarr reiterating that returning African cultural heritage is an act of justice that is essential to rebuilding African identity rather than a curatorial favour.100 They point out Nigeria’s restitution proposal to the International Council of Museums (ICOM), calling for the return of important artefacts from Great Benin, to constitute the connection between cultural return and sovereignty.101 These reclamation efforts, frequently written off as tokenistic in Western discourse, serve as the foundation for a new moral economy of heritage in which cultural restoration is inextricably linked to both economic and epistemic restoration.102 This, for us, represents a moral geography in which the restoration of beauty turns into the restoration of existence; hence, Nigeria’s endeavour to have stolen artefacts from Western museums return to it is a re-inscription of Africa’s sovereignty over its own history, culture and aesthetics.

4.2 Nigeria, CARICOM and the African Union Reparations Agenda

Nigeria’s reparations diplomacy also takes place in the context of a transoceanic dialogue, connecting Africa and its diasporas, especially through the changing dynamic between the Caribbean community and the African Union.103 The reparative discourse was expanded into a global framework during the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Follow-Up Summit on 6 to 7 September 2025, which focused on economic re-engineering, diaspora engagement, climate justice and reparations litigation.104 Nigeria’s attendance at this summit reaffirmed its pivotal role in mediating between the Caribbean and Africa as hubs of a common historical wound and aspiration. A vision of inter-hemispheric reparative solidarity, a united voice across oceans demanding justice for slavery, colonialism and their structural afterlives, was outlined in the summit’s Communiqué, which was built on the 2021 AU-CARICOM framework.105 Three key priorities emerged from the summit and currently serve as the foundation for Africa’s reparations discourse. These are strengthening of cultural restitution as both material and symbolic reparations; institutional cooperation between African and Caribbean reparations commissions; and economic re-engineering through debt justice and technological partnerships.106 These priorities reveal a paradigm shift, one making reparations a blueprint for global equity, echoing Savoy’s insistence that the return of African heritage is an act of justice rather than display.107

However, a paradox casts a shadow over Nigeria’s moral leadership in the reparations’ movement, despite taking a moral compass for it; it has not yet succeeded in converting rhetorical authority into a formalised national framework. This makes comparative experiences from other parts of the continent, such as Ghana’s Year of Return Initiative 2019,108 to provide valuable insights. The initiative reframed symbolic recognition as a tool for cultural and economic reconstruction in honour of the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Africans in slavery in the Americas.109 It illustrated how reparations can mobilise diaspora capital, turn collective memory into investment, and give the state back the power to tell its own history.110 The project demonstrated that in addition to recognition, reparations call for institutional innovation and channels that transform sorrow into development and memory into rebuilding.

Additionally, despite its flaws, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established reparations within a legal framework of testimony and recognition.111 Although its limited implementation highlights the risk of political inertia, the Commission’s assertion of a ‘right to reparation’ based on international human rights law emphasised that moral claims must be supported by enforceable frameworks.112 Parallel to this, Kenya’s Mau Mau case against the British government broadened the concept of reparations by showing that historical accountability is still possible even decades after colonial abuse.113 The successes recorded through this case are financial restitution and the symbolic admission of wrongdoing, which was bolstered by the revelatory power of documentary disclosure.114 These comparative experiences underscore the importance of reparations for Africa and the necessity of going beyond moral appeal, to be understood as tools for structural change informed by institutional design, fiscal responsibility and epistemic sovereignty.

These insights also suggest that moral leadership needs to give way to infrastructure leadership in Nigeria and, thus, it is imperative that the next stage of its reparations’ trajectory institutionalises what it has long stated. This is by establishing national reparations commissions and engaging transcontinental coordination mechanisms. Nigeria’s diplomacy must also be complemented by a legal framework and financial systems that can convert aspirations into long-lasting results in accordance with the AU-CARICOM partnership. From this perspective, we submit that reparations are no longer considered an afterthought in the discourse of development. Rather, they are its moral cornerstone, a dynamic system of justice that allows African states to reinterpret memory, sovereignty, and the moral economy of globalisation.

5.1 Cultural and symbolic restoration

This form of reparation finds basis in the psychosocial engagement116 with the past with a view to imagining a future of restitution and restoration of lost values. This comes by way of the repatriation of African artefacts, many of which were forcibly removed during pre- and colonial military campaigns, transported and kept in Western museums and private collections. For Nigeria, the most striking example are the Benin bronzes, captured by the British army during the 1897 campaign against the Kingdom of Benin.117 More than 700 of these items were kept in the British museum,118 but the restoration process began with the French government returning 26 artefacts to Benin Republic in 2021.119 Then, in 2022, Germany signed an agreement with Nigeria to return more than 1 130 Benin bronzes, some of which have been handed to the Oba of Benin and the Nigerian government.120 These acts of restitution, although symbolic, for us, restore more than stolen property; they provide a recognition of historical and colonial injustices, capable of restoring the dignity and cultural continuity of the communities owning the artefacts. Restoration also covers the promotion of indigenous languages, knowledge systems, festivals, and even traditional forms of governance that were erased or marginalised by colonial powers.

5.2 Financial compensation and economic restitution

In this framework, financial compensation and economic restitution hold a particularly contentious yet indispensable position. As Ndikumana and Boyce contend, despite the political sensitivities surrounding financial reparations, Africa’s economic dependency must be viewed as a structural continuation of colonial dependency rather than an accidental legacy.121 This way, financial reparations, following Moffett, become juridical imperatives within the broader grammar of justice rather than being moral indulgences.122 Thus, engaging in repair amounts to restructuring, while the act of compensation engenders redistribution of power. In the African context, this entails resolving the development deficiencies brought about by centuries of exploitation, and the current patterns of global marginalisation. The CARICOM Ten-Point Plan strong model, particularly, the part that focuses on institutional rehabilitation, is an example of how reparations can be incorporated into transformative development as opposed to being discrete acts of restitution.

Therefore, we position Nigeria to champion the creation of a Pan-African Reparations and Development Fund (PRDF) as an institutional repository for reparations. The body should be funded by proportionate contributions from former colonial powers and multinational corporations which, for Ndikumana and Boyce, accrued wealth from Africa’s historical exploitation.123 By allocating funds to historically underserved communities’ infrastructure, health care and education, this fund has the potential of transforming moral claims into developmental dividends. Also, the creation of a Pan-African Cultural Reparations Fund, parallel to PRDF, would aid the mobilisation of diaspora investments, restitution agreements, and public-private partnerships to revitalise Africa’s creative economies and community museums. This would align with and extend Savoy’s thesis that the restoration of cultural dignity is inextricably linked to the restoration of cultural artefacts.124

Intricately linked with Nigeria’s vision of financial reparations is the much-debated issue of comprehensive debt cancellation,125 a type of indirect reparation that reframes economic emancipation as a moral right. Many of the debts with which African states are currently burdened are either colonial in origin or the result of post-colonial dependency, especially those accrued during Structural Adjustment Programmes,126 which weakened sovereignty and increased inequality. For us, the complete cancellation of such debts would be a restitution of justice rather than a charitable concession, as it would enable African countries to reallocate funds to prioritise internal development. Thus, Nigeria as a moral leader and regional power is ideally positioned to spearhead the review and repudiation of such ‘odious debts’,127 connecting this to preferential trade frameworks to address the structural imbalances of the global economy.128 This would entail advocating World Trade Organisation (WTO) reforms that acknowledge past injustices in markets, tariffs and access129 in addition to negotiating reparative debt relief.

We also advocate Nigeria’s leadership via the articulation of a new developmental reparations’ paradigm in which global trade reform and fiscal justice are used as instruments to decolonise economic relations. However, as the reparations debate reclaims economic justice, the critical question it must address is who should benefit first, the nation or the communities most affected?130 The answer we find in the CARICOM framework which seeks financial reparations to prioritise payments reaching the communities most impacted,131 rather than being absorbed by national treasuries. From this, distributive justice should be the cornerstone of Nigeria’s reparations plan, guaranteeing that funding goes directly to historically marginalised groups still bearing the socio-economic scars of slavery, colonial extraction and post-colonial exploitation. Such local accountability could be institutionalised by a National Reparations Commission that links social reconstruction and financial justice, modelled after CARICOM. Under this arrangement, financial reparations become more than just restitution; they develop into regeneration plans, and instruments for restoring the continent’s moral economy, and a model for its renaissance.

5.3 Institutional reforms: strengthening governance and accountability

However, financial justice in itself is insufficient to heal the monumental historical harm; extensive institutional reform is also required. Gauging by the AU Transitional Justice Policy Framework, rebuilding the political and legal systems which allowed and sustained injustice is essential.132 Here, Nigeria’s leadership has the potential to be revolutionary by giving reparative justice institutional legitimacy via the formation of national and regional commissions for reparations under the aegis of the AU. In addition to supervising restitution programmes, these organisations would guarantee openness, responsibility and equity in the distribution of reparative funds.133 Importantly, Nigeria could support the establishment of an AU Reparations Tribunal to decide cases and offer advisory opinions on reparative justice, modelled after the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Court). The right to reparations would be elevated from moral discourse to legal doctrine by such a tribunal, which would codify it within African jurisprudence.134 In this way, institutional reform becomes ontological rather than just administrative; by substituting the ethics of accountability for the logic of extraction, it reinterprets the relationship between the African state and its people.

5.4 Educational and knowledge justice initiatives: fostering awareness and healing

Another pillar of Nigeria’s proposed reparations model is educational and knowledge justice, since no kind of restitution is complete without the restoration of memory and knowledge. Education is recognised as both a site of historical harm and a tool for collective restoration in the AU’s Theme of 2025, focused on knowledge and racial healing.135 Nigeria could make a significant contribution in this regard by infusing into national curricula at all educational levels modules to engage the study of slavery, colonialism and resistance justice as reconstruction rather than retaliation. The epistemic hierarchies that colonialism ingrained in educational systems would be upended by a curriculum that emphasises African agency and resilience, created by African academics, and grounded in indigenous epistemologies.136 Furthermore, Nigeria could support the creation of Pan-African Reparations Studies Centres, acting as intellectual hubs for comparative studies, reparatory theory, and innovative policy making.137 Similar to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Framework,138 a flagship AU Centre for Reparations and Restorative Justice, possibly housed at the University of Ibadan, could serve as a think tank and a memorial. Such institutions would bridge academia, policy and activism in the pursuit of epistemic justice by fostering moral consciousness in addition to knowledge production.

5.5 Legal and policy frameworks: establishing a robust reparations infrastructure

The Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation, established by UN General Assembly Resolution 60/147, provide a legal framework for dealing with egregious human rights violations.139 This makes it equally essential for frameworks for laws and policies to convert moral aspirations into legally enforceable rights regarding historical harms Africa has experienced. Nigeria’s initiatives for reparations can gain credibility and coherence if it adheres to these principles. Thus, to constitutionalise reparations as a legal right, we recommend that Nigeria leads the mobilisation of groups such as the BRICS, G77 and ACP to support reparations diplomacy through international and multilateral forums such as the CARICOM-AU cooperation.140 At the continental level, Nigeria should spearhead the effort to draft an African Reparations Protocol under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.141 At the sub-regional level, we suggest a harmonisation of reparations legislation throughout West Africa, with Nigeria using its regional clout within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to guarantee consistency in cross-border claims and unity in execution. By taking these steps, Nigeria would be positioned at the centre of a Global South alliance, creating bonds that go beyond colonial boundaries and turning reparations into a forum for South-South collaboration.

Nigeria’s legal leadership should also extend to environmental reparations, given the well-documented issues of the Niger Delta, where ecological destruction reflects the exploitative logics of colonial resource extraction.142 In addition to alleviating local suffering, acknowledging environmental harm as historical injustice would bring Nigeria’s reparations agenda into line with international climate justice movements.143 When taken as a whole, these legal, educational and institutional changes extend the reasoning behind monetary reparations into a more comprehensive theory of structural justice. They also portray Nigeria as a country uniquely positioned to articulate what could be referred to as reparative sovereignty, and as a moral and political leader in Africa’s reparations movement. This finds justification in Nigeria’s continuous attempt to move reparations from a moral appeal to an institutional design.

At the 2023 UNGA, President Tinubu’s demand that Africa be acknowledged as ‘a partner in progress rather than a debtor of history’144 represents a continental reawakening of purpose, echoing this philosophical evolution. However, as commentators and academics, including Okereke, warn, unless Nigeria’s reparations agenda is supported by comprehensive and well-coordinated institutional frameworks, it runs the risk of remaining merely symbolic.145 This problem is highlighted by Táíwò’s criticism that uncoordinated reparations turn into performative action rather than justice.146 Hence, even the most passionate moral discourse runs the risk of reproducing the very asymmetries it aims to correct in the absence of systemic coherence.147 Nigeria’s next frontier must, therefore, be the design of an integrated reparations architecture that balances its domestic priorities with continental and international movements, and ensures that administrative capability and the political will match its moral leadership. Nigeria could accomplish this by creating a National Reparations Commission, which would act as the institutional hub connecting the national, local and continental reparations agendas.

The ramifications of this reconceptualisation extend to the development paradigm. If appropriately institutionalised, it becomes a theory of historical justice in motion, uniting memory, responsibility, and the future to form a moral economy and a theory of historical justice in motion.148 However, the difficulty of reparations, as our analysis has shown, is not just in calculating past wrongs but in rebuilding society’s moral foundation.149 From this broad perspective, reparations are generative rather than retroactive; they restore the circumstances that make justice possible.150 Thus, Nigerian leadership is reframed as both a political endeavour and a moral calling; it is a call for the continent to rethink sovereignty as a restoration of our common humanity rather than as a display of power.