State Failure and Separatist Agitations in Nigeria

By

 

Professor Onu GODWIN

Department of Political Science

Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra.

godwinonu2010@gmail.com.

 

&

 

Kolapo Quadri ABAYOMI

Department of Post Graduate Studies

National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS)

National Assembly.

kolapoabayomi@gmail.com.

Abstract

In the last decades of the nineteenth century up till date, Nigeria has been plunged into multilevel and complex circumstances resulted into layered of chaos. State failed, government and the political leaders became predator, citizens took up arms against the state and its citizens. Explanations has been given to the causes of high incidences of coastal piracy and crimes, terrorism, banditry, kidnapping for ransom, armed robbery, political assassination, herdsmen attacks, theft and vandalization of essential and oil infrastructures and other image slander characters such as ‘419’ and internet fraud among the youths. The inability of a State to deliver public goods and achieve a cohesive and an acceptable level of human security is a major take-off board for fragility and failure. In such circumstance, poverty becomes a pandemic, unemployment skyrockets, and party politics and political recruitment process gets corrupted and messier. The infrastructure that determines who gets what, when and how is determined by the stomach and the extent it is fed. Instead of Nigerian state to have evolved into a framework of human progress, prosperity and happiness, it has become a sorry state of despair grooming millions of active poverty ridden population along with deteriorating and weak institutions. The outcome is political instability, greater economic crisis and possibly violence and insurgency by non-state groups. Equity and justice are often re-occurring decimal and separatism and agitation turns to centrifugal nationalist phenomenon. This chapter is a literary inquest into the state failure and how this can lead to agitations for separatism among the various disadvantaged groups in a federal state. It is also an analytically and literarily attempts to diagnose various predatory and prebendal ruling regimes in Nigeria and how they have cashed on lop-sided federal structure to inflict ailments that lead to state decay and seek to locate and measure Nigeria with these indices. It shall examine such theories of state failure as the ones advanced by Zartman (1993) and Rotberg (2003) Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner (1992). The theories attempt to create a framework for the understanding of state failure as we go further to interrogate also how institutional weakness and state policies have deepened the decay of Nigerian State.