Systemic Barriers Block Nigerian Women’s Justice: Colonial Legacies, Economic Exclusion, and Patriarchal Institutions

The Nigerian women’s justice crisis is not a failure of rights but a deliberate outcome of colonial legal inheritance, neoliberal economic policies, and patriarchal customary institutions that have been weaponized by global capital (e.

g., oil multinationals) to extract labor and resources while maintaining social control. The 1914 amalgamation of Nigeria under British rule imposed a hybrid legal system where customary laws—already patriarchal—were codified and enforced by colonial courts, a framework retained post-independence despite constitutional guarantees of equality. Today, Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy, shaped by IMF structural adjustment programs and debt crises, has deepened women’s economic dependency, while donor-funded NGOs frame justice as a technical problem solvable through digital tools or legal literacy, obscuring the need for systemic reforms. Indigenous feminist traditions, from the 1929 Aba Women’s Riots to the Yoruba concept of 'Iya,' offer alternative models of justice rooted in communal accountability, but these are sidelined in favor of Western legal frameworks that prioritize state recognition over collective power. True transformation requires dismantling colonial legal structures, redistributing economic power through land reform and UBI, and centering marginalized women’s leadership in both local and global arenas, linking their struggles to broader movements against extractive capitalism.