A COMPARATIVE DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS OF STATUTORY AND EXECUTIVE-INITIATED SOCIAL PROGRAMMES IN NIGERIA

Nigerian federal social programmes exhibit a striking divergence in longevity. Some survive repeated changes of administration and continue to disburse resources decades after their creation, while others are suspended, defunded or quietly abandoned within a single political cycle. This study examined how the legal basis of a programme's creation relates to that divergence, through a comparative documentary analysis of seven statutory and ten executive-initiated federal social programmes in Nigeria between 1976 and 2024, drawing on seventy-one publicly available documents and four matched comparison pairs constructed to hold policy domain constant while varying legal foundation. Analysis was thematic and was guided by historical institutionalism, policy feedback theory and the literature on policy robustness and state capability. Six themes emerged: a pronounced survival differential across political transitions; the insulation of resources through dedicated statutory financing; permanent institutional hosts as against ad hoc secretariats; revision by amendment as against termination by silence; statutory conversion as a survival strategy; and the limits of legislation. The evidence indicates that legal foundation is the most consistent institutional correlate of durability among the factor’s observable in the documentary record, and that its association with survival is not accounted for by demonstrated programme performance, since programmes with published evidence of beneficiary gains were discontinued in the executive category and retained in the statutory one. The findings equally indicate that statutory anchoring secures existence rather than delivery: statutory programmes in the corpus survived while exhibiting delayed activation, dormancy without repeal and persistent quality failure, a pattern consistent with policy drift and with capability constraints that are managerial rather than legal in character. The study therefore advances statutory anchoring as a necessary but insufficient condition for effective social provision, and recommends that codification be coupled with dedicated formula-based financing, permanent administrative hosting and statutory obligations of performance.