FRAGILE STATE AND THE CHALLENGE OF INSURGENCY IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Nigeria have continued to navigate into fragility as indexes like; weak state capacity, weak state legitimacy and citizens vulnerability to a range of shocks, indicative of a fragile state, is now a reality as every news item today in Nigeria is on insecurity. Notwithstanding the global comprehensive discourse on fragile states and the danger they pose to the contemporary world order, the efforts of various security agencies to tame the ugly trend, Nigeria have continued to face a multifaceted kidnapping threat. Fragile and conflict prone settings take an immense toll on human capital, consequently producing rancorous series of crisis that have the capability of decreasing lifetime productivity of people’s wages and diminish their socioeconomic mobility. The work employs the library research data collecting approach, and data were acquired via secondary sources with fast appraisal assessment. The study, which was based on State Fragility Theory, examined the Nigerian state's vulnerability in the face of rising insurgency threats, with an emphasis on kidnappings in Nigeria from 2015 to 2024. And concludes that, Nigeria is indeed in a state of fragility which have resulted in the
existence of ungoverned spaces in Nigeria and non-state actors (kidnappers) are taking advantage of it to entrench themselves deeper in society, as government presence in the space they occupy seems to be non in existence, this is a major contributing factor to
the striving business of kidnappings in Nigeria. The paper therefore, recommends amongst others the substantial investments in small and medium enterprises that are necessary and have the capacity to create jobs in other to upscale economic growth.