Nigeria to Big To be Secured

NIGERIA TOO BIG TO SECURED?

The World Bank overview of Nigeria state that over 20,000 people were killed, about 2.2 million are forcibly displaced, and more than 15 million have been affected since 2009. On September 27th, 2021, the Nigeria prominent newspaper, the Guardian reported that 330,000 Nigerian refugees are languishing in neighboring countries due to insurgency and armed banditry in the North East and North West.
For a decade, Africa’s largest oil and gas producer has faced security challenges on numerous fronts, from criminality and armed militancy to jihadism, sectarian violence, and political unrest. More or less, every part of the country has been affected by the recurring violence and crime, triggering a massive humanitarian crisis and threatening the country’s stability.
Based on the International Crisis Group’s report, the drivers of displacement in Nigeria are multi-faceted, complex, and often overlapping. This report analyzes the drivers of insecurity and population displacement into three categories: state, jihadist, and sectarian actors.
The state actors are the number one responsible for the insecurity issue in Nigeria due to its ineffectiveness and the use of disproportionate force on civilians in gross violations of human rights. Amnesty International has accused the Nigeria Security Forces of operating not different from the terrorists, using excessive force, physical abuse, secrets detentions, extortion, and burning of houses. This year, Amnesty International documented at least 115 people killed by the Security Forces between March and June 2021.
For over a decade, the North-eastern region of Nigeria has been devastated by insecurity, as the Jihadists continue to terrorize the region with military-style offensive, suicide bombings and kidnappings. According to Global Security Tracker, nearly 350,000 people killed in northeast Nigeria since 2009. The Human Rights Watch group recently stated that the Islamist insurgents killed at least 363 civilians between January and September this year.
Boko Haram is the notorious organization in the Northeast region of Nigeria, taking advantage of the region’s poverty and other security challenges to expend. The Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) is another jihadist group responsible for tormenting the rural population and fueling Islamic extremist ideologies in northeast Nigeria.
Comparing the data produced by Nigeria Security Tracker, a Council on Foreign Relation’s Africa program, death by the Sectarian actors is rising in Nigeria, from 630 deaths in 2020 to 810 loss of life as of September 2021. Competition over scarce resources, land disputes, ethnic differences, criminality, militancy, and settler-indigene tensions are the factors raising the number of deaths by the sectarian actors.

Based on Africa Security Brief, a publication of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, since 2010, over 15,000 have been killed in clashes over limited resources between herders and farmers in the Northwestern, Middle Belt, and recently the Southern States. At the same time, kidnapping has become a lucrative business in some parts of the country. Aljazeera reported that violent attacks by the assailants known locally as bandits are common across the Northwest and Central parts of Nigeria, especially in remote communities with no adequate security presence. These criminals raid villages, kidnap civilians and schoolchildren from their classrooms and burn houses almost daily.
Is Nigeria too big to secure?
A 2018 nationwide poll indicated that 65 percent of Nigeria feel the country is not secure, stated by the Chatham House in 2019. Today, the majority of Nigeria feels the same as the scale of the insecurity is threatening every fabric of Nigeria society. However, the issue is not the size or the number of people to care off; instead, the government’s inadequacy in responding to the security concern of its citizens. Many International organizations assessed the Nigeria security concern not in terms of too big to secure, but the inaction and ineffective government policies, comprising corruption, poverty, inequality, higher level of youth unemployment, and lack of economic opportunity in rural areas.

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