9 - The Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

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Law and Security in Nigeria
discourse from the hypothesis that where those factors are
absent, the intention to perpetrate acts of criminality and
violence would also not materialise.
The primary causes of crime and conflicts in Nigeria,
going by available literature on the subject, are rooted in the
inept structural forms which create and sustain human
insecurity in its broadest sense, including deprivation of
social and economic rights. 119 These factors are complex and
cannot be expatiated in this discourse. All the same, they are
relevant in their collective capacity as an indirect stimulant of
the demand for small arms. They include high levels of
unemployment among the teeming population of youths and
the working class age, inequality in the distribution of
income and privileges of governance, low level of
infrastructural and economic development, lack of social
amenities, poverty, corruption, profligacy, declining moral
standards, lack of good governance, neglect of the minority
especially the Niger Delta, among others. 120
The unemployment factor is specifically identified as an
important dynamic in the armed-conflict cum small arms
challenge. Ginifer and Ismail underscored the nexus between
the two phenomena in their study, noting that political
violence “percolates the entire Nigerian State where political
elites mobilise the pool of unemployed youths, often along
ethnic, religious and party affiliations, as a vital political
119. See Ifedayo Adebayo: “We’re Failed State No. 14”, Next News Alert, at:
http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5591733-
146/were_failed_state_number_14.csp, citing the current 2010 failed State
index report released by Peace Fund and published in Foreign Policy
Magazine, which listed Nigeria among countries like Sudan and
Zimbabwe as failed States. A State is deemed to have failed when the
government of such a State is unable to perform the basic responsibilities
of a sovereign State such as providing security, rendering of social
services and protecting the human rights of its inhabitants.
120. Hazen and Horner: op cit, pp 22-23; Human Rights Watch “The Warri
Crisis”, op cit, pp 24 - 25. See also Ginifer and Ismail, op cit.