Insecurity in Equilibrium

Order and Development are not completely separable

In a previous essay, I argued that Nigeria’s security challenge is not, strictly speaking, a security problem. As I wrote there:

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.

Insecurity has joined the plethora of binding constraints witholding Nigeria’s prosperity. After all, how can people work or do business while constantly fearing for their lives and general safety? My attempt in that previous essay is to urge a more general view that does not just isolate insecurity as a problem. Nigeria faces a development problem more broadly, and I believe that acquiring the capability to solve insecurity and impose order is embedded in trying to solve the development problem.

The shift in frame is necessary because a decade of military solutions has not yielded results. Many will argue that this failure is due to corruption and weak capacity of the Nigerian state to deploy tactical intelligence, surveillance, and other tools of modern military operations. But this just deepens the questions. Why does the capacity of the state to solve this problem remain weak despite more than a decade of intense military spending? Why hasn’t the state recognised its weaknesses, and if it has, why are they not corrected? In short, why does insecurity persist?

Security is More Than Force

Security is usually treated as a basic output of the state, and most explanations for its failure remain managerial. They look for gaps in intelligence, poor morale in the ranks, corruption, or lack of technology. These factors matter at the margins. But they do not explain why the repeated application of force produces the same outcome. The assumption is that once the state has enough resources and enough force, order will follow. But experience shows this is not automatic.

In practice, states do not eliminate violence by default. They organise it. They decide where to apply force, where to withhold it, and where to tolerate disorder. This is inherently a political choice rather than a moral one. Authority always involves choices about how force is used. Those choices are shaped by incentives rather than intentions.

Violence and Economic Life

If one wants to understand why insecurity persists, it helps to look at the underlying organisation of economic life. Development requires decisions that stretch across time. Investment involves giving up something in the present in exchange for returns in the future. That exchange only makes sense when the future is reasonably predictable. Where violence is unpredictable or unresolved, long-term investment becomes scarce, and economic activity shifts towards survival and short horizons.

Where economic life remains short-term, rulers have little reason to restrain violence across society. If growth is weak and capital formation is limited, disorder becomes less costly to tolerate. In such settings, violence does not need to be eliminated. It only needs to be managed in ways that do not threaten the existing distribution of power and resources. The interaction between violence and economic organisation helps explain why insecurity can persist even with an expanding security response.

Development and Nigeria’s Selective Order

A pivot to a development strategy can break the deadlock of persistent violence. When investments in public goods are deep and rooted in long-term strategy, violence becomes too costly to tolerate. But this is also a political choice that requires a hard break from a stable equilibrium. Political leaders can invoke development rhetorically, but they are rarely committed to it. Development required sustained and broad economic growth, rules rather than discretion, taxation rather than predation, and a certain restraint on the use of force. It expands the number of actors with assets to protect and claims to make. It raises expectations about services, fairness, and accountability. In short, it increases the political costs of rule. For this reason, development is not always the preferred strategy for maintaining power.

In places where political survival does not depend on development, and where the population is not recognised as valued economic agents, restraint on power is optional, and violence is tolerated. In such places, authority of the state can still be maintained through selective enforcement, control of key resources, and the containment of disorder rather than its resolution. Major roads, commercial corridors and important rituals of the state (like elections) may be relatively secure. Politically connected economic actors often enjoy protection. But beyond these selected places and situations, the presence of the state becomes absent. Violence persists where political and economic returns are perceived to be lowest.

Where Security Comes From

Insecurity is not inevitable, but political and economic incentives can make it “tolerable” - however horrible it is for the victims. This also suggests that it cannot be resolved by force alone. Security improves when violence becomes too costly to tolerate. That tends to happen when prosperity becomes widespread enough that disorder threatens the future expectations of a large segment of the population. Where development and growth create assets, jobs, and predictable returns, disorder becomes politically expensive. The states that become capable of maintaining relative peace and order within their borders are not those that continuously expand the coercive powers of the security force. They are those who commit themselves to a future that is worth defending by all. For insecurity to become less tolerable, the Nigerian state needs to make that commitment credible.

Further Reading

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History - Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast

Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development - Robert Bates