Abstract
In an attempt to demonstrate that the developed world has obligations to alleviate severe poverty, Thomas Pogge advances theories driven by human rights to focus on negative rights and duties of the avoidance of harm. For Pogge, the theory of global justice is developed on a minimalist account of what it means to harm. He shares the view that violation of the negative duty not to harm constitutes an injustice. This injustice is enacted against the citizens of developing nations by the developed nations through global institutional order. Consequently, Pogge proposes the disbursement of global wealth, to the less developed countries. This paper critically examines Pogge’s distributive justice proposal and its implications for the Nigerian state. It establishes that Pogge’s proposal is not tenable if applied to the Nigerian state. This is because it runs contrary to the theory of productive justice which holds that resources to be distributed to the global poor should first be produced by everyone in order to ensure equity and fairness amongst all instead of violating the rights of entitlement of those who have produced the available resources. The paper concludes that, in order to deal with high level of poverty in Nigeria and make the Nigerian state more productive there is need for the fusion of political (transparency and accountability) and economic diversification solutions to tackle the domestic causes of severe poverty in Nigeria.