Nigeria's challenge, post-civil war, albeit hydra-headed, is one: the demise of fiscal federalism. All other challenges - insecurity, unemployment, poverty, low standards of public education and healthcare, mismanagement of huge petroleum resources, environmental degradation etc., result directly from the demise of fiscal federalism, which demise has halted economic development. The most significant example of this failure is the situation in which Nigeria's refineries stopped production for years: the country, one of the world's leading producers of crude oil, simply exports crude oil and imports fuel. The implication for a country of 170 million people and a major crude oil producer is a grotesque economic distortion, which, coupled with a consistently erratic electric power supply to industry in an aggressively consumer nation, is, simply, under-development. It is a strong argument to say that the underpinnings of Nigeria's current underdevelopment challenge are British colonial policy and laws such as the Mineral Oils Ordinance of December 31, 1914, which seized the locals' petroleum resources for British colonial accounts. However, beyond British colonial economic adventurism, I argue that Nigeria's present state of underdevelopment was triggered by post-independence and, therefore, postcolonial, notably, civil war and post-civil war military decrees, particularly General Yakubu Gowon's Petroleum Decree of 1969, which is federal government's seizure of local petroleum resources; General Olusegun Obasanjo's Land Use Decree of 1978, which made applicable to the whole country the erstwhile Northern Nigerian government's acquisition of all interest in land in Northern Nigeria through the 1962 Land Tenure Law of the Northern Region; and, particularly, Section 40(3) of General Obasanjo's Constitution of 1979, reenacted verbatim in Section 44(3) of General Abdulsalami Abubakar's Constitution of 1999, which is post-independence military government's seizure of all minerals and mineral oils. These military laws combined to effectively destroy the basic tenet and thrust of Nigeria's political union as well as its Independence and Republican Constitutions of 1960 and 1963, namely, fiscal federalism, which propelled the country's initial rapid economic growth. Therefore, Nigeria's economic crisis, culminating in social, political and economic upheavals, is legally induced. The current monumental economic challenge of Nigeria is epitomized by the fact that in July 2015, a third of the country's thirty six federating states were so pauperized, they had to be bailed out by the federal government to enable them pay salaries, some owed for several months. On the other hand, the picture of what would happen when Nigeria fully resuscitates fiscal federalism has been clearly and recently demonstrated by the country's regional Government of Lagos State, starting with Governor Bola Tinubu, followed by Governors Babatunde Fashola and Akinwunmi Ambode. In 2004, the Federal Government under President Olusegun Obasanjo had withheld Lagos State's local councils' share of essentially federal oil proceeds and continued to do so over a period of about three years, until the end of Obasanjo's presidency in 2007. This compelled Lagos State to accelerate and expand its internal search for alternative sources of revenue. This bold and progressive move by Lagos against the challenge of economic annihilation has culminated in Lagos State consistently earning internally generated revenue (IGR) far in excess of its share of oil and gas proceeds from the federation account. More recently in April 2015, the State reported that it was generating an average of 23 billion naira IGR per month. In 1999, Lagos State's average IGR per month was 600 million naira and her budget was 17 billion naira. But by 2014, the state's budget had risen to 500 billion naira. Lagos has thus indeed become a super West African state able to compete with most c