NJIKO: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal of Humanities, Law, Education and Social Sciences

Henry David Thoreau is conventionally considered as a towering figure that advocated and practiced nonviolent resistance against social evils. Thoreau's elevation of conscientious integrity in an era of social conformism, his passionate opposition to the institutional degradation of human life and values, and his enduring literary production as an author, public speaker, and natural scientist, all expressed in a distinctive prose style at once classic and personal, placed him at the heart of the era now known as the American Renaissance. Consequently, because of the complexity associated with the readings, understanding and the application of the paradox of Civil Disobedience as contained in Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, this paper adopts a hermeneutic method which is basically the philosophical method of interpretation of texts, ideas, etc. from another’s or author’s point of view to interrogate the crisis of nation-building in Nigerian state. This is apt especially now that the crisis is plunging the Nigerian state into a state of lawlessness. Thus, it is the findings of this paper that corruption, leadership failure, institutional decay, and poor exploration of the rich tenets, and techniques in the concept of civil disobedience by the Nigerian citizens, especially as it has been demonstrated globally by their citizens remain the bane of Nation-building in Nigeria. It is our conclusion that unless, there is a conscious, deliberate, and effective exploration of the concept of civil disobedience by the Nigerian citizens, especially as it has been demonstrated globally, the crisis of bad leadership and underdevelopment rocking the Nigerian state would remain a perpetual stigma on us.

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