WAR ECONOMY AND NIGERIA'S SECURITY: MYTHS, REALITIES AND THE WAY FORWARD

Abstract

Nigeria's security crisis is inseparable from the political economy of armed conflict. The war economy, the system of economic incentives, resource flows, and institutional arrangements that sustain violent conflict, has evolved across the Niger Delta, the Northeast insurgency, the Northwest banditry corridor, and the Middle Belt farmer-herder nexus into a multi-billion-dollar informal ecosystem that simultaneously fuels, finances, and perpetuates insecurity. Yet scholarly and policy discourse remains captive to competing myths: that conflict actors are uniformly ideologically motivated, that elevated security spending produces security outcomes, and that war economies are peripheral to Nigeria's mainstream political economy. This article challenges these myths through a systematic review of empirical evidence spanning the period 2010–2023. Drawing on 87 studies selected through PRISMA-compliant screening from an initial pool of 342 sources, and grounded in Keen's (2005) war economy framework as theoretically elaborated through Kaldor's (2013) new wars thesis and Collier and Hoeffler's (2004) greed-grievance model, the analysis demonstrates that Nigeria's war economy generates an estimated $3.8–5.2 billion in annual illicit revenue, diverts between 17.4% and 23.6% of federal expenditure to a security sector whose performance remains deeply deficient, and reproduces structural conditions, governance failure, resource capture, and elite complicity that render purely military counter-insurgency strategies ineffective. The article concludes with a theoretically grounded and empirically anchored policy framework for breaking the war economy cycle.