UBUNTU AND CHILD POVERTY IN NIGERIA: AN AFRICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF COMMUNAL RESPONSIBILITY

Abstract

Nigeria's child poverty crisis is widely interpreted through economic and
developmental lenses, yet such interpretations leave the moral and
metaphysical dimensions of the crisis largely unexamined. This study
adopts qualitative philosophical analysis, using conceptual
interpretation, textual analysis, and comparative ethical analysis of
African philosophical traditions and religious literature. We draw on
Ubuntu, the African relational philosophy of personhood, to argue that
the persistence of severe child deprivation in Nigeria should be
understood primarily as a failure of communal responsibility rather than a
mere shortfall in income or service delivery. Read alongside its Nigerian
cultural expressions in Omoluabi (Yoruba), Omenani (Igbo), and
Tarbiyya (Hausa-Fulani), Ubuntu discloses a sustained, indigenous
moral tradition that has historically treated the child as a shared trust
rather than a private burden. The paper traces how social, economic,
political, and religious changes have eroded the communal structures that
once enacted this conviction, leaving millions of Nigerian children
exposed to hunger, educational exclusion, labour, displacement, and
neglect. It concludes by proposing Ubuntu, read together with the ethical
resources of Christianity, Islam, and African Traditional Religion (ATR),
as a constructive framework for rebuilding social solidarity. The paper
contributes a philosophical reframing of child poverty as a problem of
communal failure, with implications for religious engagement, cultural
renewal, and public policy in Nigeria and beyond.