Nigeria’s Changing Security Matrix and Management of Insecurity

The chapter takes a panoramic view of the changing configurations of insecurity as well as the various strategies that successive Nigerian governments have devised and adopted in dealing with them. Insecurity is widespread in Nigeria and manifests in various forms and dimensions. Despite huge bureaucratic machinery to deal with insecurity, Nigeria’s security profile tends to be uninspiring. This is so because Nigeria’s security apparatuses have been patently reactive rather than proactive in dealing with security threats. With the use of secondary data, this chapter examines Nigeria’s security architecture and links the seeming longitudinal ubiquity of insecurity to structural contradictions, the incapacity of its security apparatuses and the superior economic payoffs that accrue to actors. The chapter holds further that the seeming upsurge in the spate of insecurity in Nigeria signposts the gradual erosion and de-legitimisation of the state. Thus, the chapter advocates that the state must decisively recover its supremacy by articulating holistic, people-driven security reforms that will mainstream the national question in the insecurity equation.