Insecure and Incapable
The Military Republic will not solve Nigeria's problem of order
Frontier Matters podcast is currently on a holiday break, but like the nice people that we are, there will be a special December episode next week Wednesday with a fascinating guest.
Like a giant leech at the top of the body politic, [the Nigerian] government is essentially there to fund itself. - David Pilling
Nigeria’s insecurity problem is vast. Whole regions live under the threat of bandit raids. Highways are unsafe. The threat of kidnapping in rural communities is now a fact of daily life. Insurgents still hold ground in the Northeast. Whatever the politics behind these crises, one conclusion is unavoidable: The Nigerian state has shown that it cannot reliably secure the lives of its citizens.
Ultimately, this is a classic state capacity problem. Yet the standard response in the last fifteen years has been to keep gassing up the security state. Increased funding and deployment of the army, police, and other security units. It should not be a surprise that this strategy always fails. Security is a public good. The Nigerian state already struggles to deliver other public goods like health, electricity, education and infrastructure. It would be remarkable if it somehow excelled at security alone.
There have been arguments for better use of intelligence, surveillance, and modern technology by the security forces. Nevertheless, this does not really address the capacity question. Despite being confronted with what seems like an existential threat, why does the Nigerian state keep failing? Some may allege corruption and sabotage, and those are plausible reasons. One speculative idea I will put forward is that this is not a security problem, but a development one.
The standard story on state capacity usually tracks back to the sociologist Charles Tilly. Strong states emerge from conflicts. Over the years, there have been clarifications and exceptions to Tilly’s hypothesis—especially with regards to African nation-states. But I am still persuaded by its underlying logic. Weak states developed capacity by finding consensus to respond to a collective threat. Nonetheless, I suspect this is no longer true. In today’s world, I will argue that growth makes the state, and not war. Protection may be the binding social contract 200 years ago, but I believe the binding social contract today is prosperity. The development process itself helps facilitate the technical, know-how, and fiscal capacity necessary to confront security challenges.
Perhaps the best way to approach Nigeria's security crisis is to no longer separate security from development. Nigeria needs a growth consensus, and not in the shallow sense of quarterly GDP growth. One reason this remains elusive is that the current elite are unwilling to bet on a different reality than the one they currently live. But continuing down this path is a risk to the country itself. The actual reality today is that being poor means remaining perpetually weak.
I will have more to say on this in the near future.
Growth makes states. This is amazing. I'll add that a quick path to growth is, perhaps, modernisation.
Part of the trap we've found ourself is that the country is a natural state moonlighting as a modern one because we inherited these perfunctory institutions from the Brits.
It is easy to think about growth and development as a preventative panacea to security challenges in a developing environment. However, given the current security landscape and the acknowledged lack of state capacity here, is it possible to have growth as a corrective measure? Will the breakdown of security not hinder the diffusion of development across the country? Wondering how the government will manage that.