Presented at the National Conference on Education Equity, Nicon Luxury Hotels, Abuja, August 8, 2019. This paper is research in progress. It is an initial draft and the ideas in it will be fleshed out after the meeting.
Affirmative Action and Inequalities: Theoretical Slip and the Nigerian LapsesDoes affirmative action bridge inequalities? If yes, why has the policy persisted and become permanent in societies that have adopted it? This paper attempts to answer this question in the Nigerian context where the policy was driven by horizontal educational imbalance during the terminal phase of colonialism. Drawing on Ronald Dworkin�s resource egalitarian theory that defends affirmative action especially in university admissions, it argues that the policy has been successful in terms of bridging political inequalities; however, inequalities persist in the very educational sector that drove the policy in 1954. The paper locates the source of the imbalance in the apparent lack of attention to disparities at the levels of primary and secondary education. Using this empirical lapse, the paper highlights a shortcoming in the philosophical argument: namely, the failure to grapple with imbalances at the lower levels of education. The conclusion is that one could only begin to contemplate the disappearance of affirmative action if its main driving force is first addressed head-on.
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