Nigeria’s Crisis of Priorities: What Fiqh al-Awlawiyyat Teaches About Governance Failure

Abstract

Nigeria’s governance challenges are often explained through corruption, weak institutions, and limited resources. While these factors are significant, they do not sufficiently account for a deeper structural problem, the consistent misordering of national priorities. This paper examines this issue through the framework of Fiqh al-Awlawiyyat (jurisprudence of priorities), a principle in Islamic legal theory that emphasizes the ranking of actions according to necessity and public benefit. Drawing on the maqasid al-shari'ah hierarchy of daruriyyat (necessities), hajiyyat (needs), and tahsiniyyat (embellishments), the paper argues that many governance decisions in Nigeria reflect a persistent inversion of priorities. Resources are frequently directed toward highly visible or politically attractive projects, while foundational sectors such as healthcare, education, electricity, and rural infrastructure remain underdeveloped. The study adopts a qualitative conceptual approach, relying on policy patterns and infrastructural development trends to illustrate this imbalance. It identifies a clear legal and normative gap in Nigerian public finance law, specifically the lack of an ethical framework for guiding the prioritization of public expenditure. This study explicitly fills this gap by demonstrating that Fiqh al-Awlawiyyat provides a structured normative framework capable of guiding public resource allocation in line with the maqasid al-shari'ah.The paper concludes that governance reform in Nigeria requires not only institutional restructuring but also a principled ethical framework for prioritization that consistently places essential human welfare above symbolic or prestige driven projects.