ISSA ALABI'S POEM ON MAJOR CAUSES OF ECONOMIC CRIMES IN NIGERIA: AN ANALYSIS THROUGH ISLAMIC LAW PARADIGM

Abstract

It is not in doubt that an average Nigerian citizen now passes through untold hardship in a bid to secure daily bread and sustain his family. Prevalence of economic crimes is one of the reasons accountable for this unpleasant situation. A discussion of the problem, economic crime, is the main thrust of this paper. Although, there have been monotony of legal and institutional frameworks from the side of the government to combat the menace, the thorny pain from the woes of the catastrophe is yet to abate. There has been a number of scholarly researches into the causes of economic crime but same is yet to achieve the much-anticipated result of taming the tide of the crime. It is thus the mindset in this treatise to survey what could be major factors responsible for the spread of economic crime with a view to advancing workable and effective solutions thereto. The fashionable perspective of Isa Abubakr Alabi, a Nigerian Arabic poet per excellence, in his poetic predication of the reason behind economic crime on moral decadence in man, has caught the fancy of the present researcher. To this extent, the work has adopted two different aspects of human moral turpitude which the poet under reference mentions as the twin points of instigation of economic and financial crime in the country. Employing doctrinal method of legal writing, which is in tune with pure analytic engagement that the pattern of work at hand requires, it is found that advancing adequate solutions to the two alluded moral deficiencies in man and heeding the said solutions will most likely checkmate economic crime and restore peace and fulfilment back to all. The writer shall achieve this by engaging in deep legal analysis of the said twin aspects of human moral decadence which have been discerned upon reading the first two collections of Isa Alabi’s Arabic poem; The Garden (Al-Riyadh) and The Seven Lines-Patterned Poem or Rhyme Royal (Al-Suba‘iyyat) of the same poet, Isa Abubakr Alabi.