Erosion of the Value System and National Disarray: A Philosophical Diagnosis of Nigeria's Moral Crisis

This article argues that Nigeria's recurring crises of corruption, insecurity, poverty, and misinformation are not discrete institutional failures but symptoms of a deeper collapse in the country's shared ethical order. Rather than treating value erosion as a rhetorical backdrop to political-economy explanations, we advance it as the primary analytic category: institutions in Nigeria are not merely poorly designed but progressively evacuated of the normative meanings that once made them legitimate. Drawing on African communitarian ethics (Mbiti, Menkiti, Gyekye), classical and continental moral philosophy (Aristotle, MacIntyre, Kant, Durkheim, Weber, Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur), and postcolonial theory (Fanon, Ekeh, Mbembe), we develop a layered diagnosis that traces the rupture from precolonial ethical lifeworlds through colonial bifurcation to four contemporary sites of moral disintegration: predatory politics, survivalist economic ethics, digitally mediated moral ambiguity, and the commercialization of religious authority. We then read these sites through virtue ethics, deontological and capability-based theories of justice, and postcolonial critique to show that they share a common structure: the substitution of instrumental calculation for ethical obligation. We conclude that technical and institutional reforms, while necessary, cannot by themselves resolve a crisis that is at root moral, and that Nigeria's path to renewal requires a deliberate reconstruction of civic virtue, communal solidarity, and narrative identity alongside, not instead of, institutional reform.