Nigeria’s Security Challenges and the Crisis of Development: Towards a New Framework for Analysis

Abstract

This paper develops a new approach towards understanding and explaining the causes behind the prevailing level of insecurity in Nigeria today. Today, the country is in the grip of various destructive forces that are coalescing to give it a failed-status toga. The paper shows that the current state of insecurity is a manifestation of deep-rooted and structurally entrenched crisis of development that creates the environment for the emergence of conditions of poverty, unemployment, and inequality in the country. These, in turn, lead to frustration, alienation and, ultimately, social discontent that spark violence and insecurity. Without the enabling environment, these conditions could not have metamorphosed into serious national security problems threatening to tear the country apart. The findings of the paper show that although Nigeria may appear to be failing, the trends leading to this situation are reversible, if seriously proactive and sustained measures could be adopted by the government and the international community. The implication of this is that policymakers have the duty to arrest this drift through social justice and development. Thus, to address the security problem in Nigeria is in effect, to address its crisis of development.