NOZICK’S MINIMAL STATE AND THE NIGERIAN PARADOX OF RIGHTS VIOLATION
This paper examines Robert Nozick’s concept of the minimal state and deploys it as a critical framework for analyzing the persistent human rights abuses in Nigeria’s democratic order. Against the backdrop of liberal political philosophy, Nozick’s minimal state is presented as a normative model that strictly limits state power to the protection of individual rights against force, fraud, theft, and contractual violation. The paper finds out that the Nigerian state operates in a fundamentally anti-minimalist manner, routinely exceeding these legitimate bounds through coercive policies, excessive securitization, and systemic violations of civil, political, and economic rights. Using philosophical analysis and normative critique, the study demonstrates that practices such as extrajudicial killings, suppression of dissent, forced evictions and redistributive policies like the federal character principle stand in direct contradiction to Nozick’s libertarian conception of justice and state legitimacy. The paper contends that Nigeria’s persistent human rights crisis is not accidental but structurally linked to its expansive and intrusive conception of state power. It concludes that the erosion of trust, rise of militancy, secessionist agitations, and widespread political alienation in Nigeria are predictable consequences of an anti-minimalist state that has lost sight of its primary moral justification: the protection of individual rights.
Keywords: Democracy, Human Rights, Justice, Minimal State, Political Power, Political Authority, State.