Citation :

Okuguni Cletus O, Fasinu Emmanuel Selome, Adeseke Akinwale Stephen, Adetunji Emmanuel, Ochoma Ifeanyi Chukwu, Alade Adebola Afolake, 2024. "Interrogating National Jurisprudence and Governance amidst Sharia Encroachment into Indigenous Lebensraum" ESP International Journal of Science, Humanities & Management Studies(ESP-IJSHMS)  Volume 2, Issue 1: 14-26.

Abstract :

Contemporary African laws evolved from multi-lateral sources. They demand continuous critical appraisals and trend analysis. Nigeria’s present day juridical realities pose for it a conundrum difficult but not impossible to unravel. Africa is faced with a tripartite-complex scenario of conflict of laws. The struggle whether to revert to its rich jurisprudential past, continue with the neo-classicist, colonial legal systems, adapt its past to contemporary, contextual realities, or entirely abdicate its rich cultural past and put on an entirely new toga of extraneous legal cultures. This study challenges the notion and assertion that sharia is a primordial African legal code, and insists that it is neither African in origin, nor applicable for universal, moral, religious, economic, aesthetic and practicable African existential needs. A proper analysis, categorisation, contextual clarification, adaptation and application of African laws vis-à-vis the context of imported legal frameworks and jurisprudence is highly imperative in the face of the sharia legal code’s misapplication within the Nigerian body polity. The study interrogates the rationale for the insertion of sharia in the Nigerian legal corpus. It posits that sharia must be called what it is – a foreign religious cum cultural and parochial legal imposition on the psyche of a ‘religiously-conquered’ African populace. Consequently, the study implores Africans to urgently interrogate both their indigenous and imported legal codes and chart their owned, fundamental, legal cultures and jurisprudence in the light of primordial, historical, nationalist exigencies and cultural resurgence amid the contemporary challenges of jurisprudence and juridical contexts and conflicting praxis.

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Keywords :

Conflict of Laws, Jurisprudence, Lebensraum, Indigenous/Natural Law, Governance.