Crime, Terror and Insecurity in Nigeria

Nigeria faces numerous security threats: from high rates of violent crime and enduring kidnap-for-ransom issues to long-running insurgencies in the northeast and a metastasising banditry problem in the northwest. Local assessments of these dynamics are often contested across demography and geography, at times feeding on a mix of context-specific tensions and historical inequalities. Given the influence such perspectives can have on the success and efficacy of interventions, it is essential to better understand grassroots experiences of insecurity and their associated pathways of change.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted across Borno, Yobe and Kaduna, this report takes bottom-up perceptions of violence as a starting point for analysing northern Nigeria’s threat landscape, exploring how organised crime, terrorism and other forms of insecurity are perceived at the subnational and local level. Much of the analysis is based on interview and focus group data, incorporating existing literature to caveat and contextualise respondent contributions (where possible) within a wider body of evidence. Such insights offer valuable entry points for interrogating the mechanisms that feed into and facilitate violence, and for identifying the implications they raise for domestic stakeholders and foreign donors. 

Participants broadly identified four categories of violence – terrorism, banditry, petty crime and gangsterism, and corruption and extra-legal abuses – although the exact scope, mechanics and impact varied. Many highlighted how the fragmentation of violent extremism (VE) in the northeast has led to divergent forms of behaviour, with some groups seen as predatory and indiscriminate while others appeared more predictable and rational, despite the widespread conflation of terrorist activity under the generic label of ‘Boko Haram’. While VE was considered an increasingly ruralised problem due to the securitisation of urban spaces in the northeast, banditry seems ever-more pervasive, impacting remote villages, towns and cities, and diffusing from the northwest to other regions. The emergence of jihadist symbols and tactics – including mass kidnappings and complex attacks on military targets – has led to considerable international discussion over a prospective ‘crime–terror nexus’, notions of which were reflected in a small proportion of the interview data. However, respondents also highlighted the chaotic and opportunistic nature of conflict across the north and the insufficiency of existing national-legal categorisations for violence, which is often context-specific and highly localised (despite operational similarities). 

Although the scale of VE and banditry means they tend to become the focus of national and international interventions, participants acknowledged the additional impact of petty crime and gangsterism on regional communities. These were identified as both a cause and a consequence of insecurity and were linked by interviewees to long-term structural issues of unemployment and undereducation, as well as to trauma, displacement and disruption caused by ongoing conflict. Similarly, local fieldwork referenced the propensities of government actors to generate insecurity – from extra-legal violence to endemic corruption – leading to chronic levels of distrust and a perception that political and economic elites benefit from continued instability. While state authorities and portions of the wider public have empowered so-called ‘vigilante’ groups – given their apparent role as an effective security provider – several participants expressed concern over their alleged involvement in criminal behaviour and the risk of further upheaval. 

Although these discrete forms of insecurity have their own thematically and spatially defined drivers and dynamics, they coexist within a shared social ecology – a broader system conducive to violent mobilisation. In the case of northern Nigeria, the cumulative impact of colonial mismanagement and neo-patrimonial governance has arguably encouraged systemic corruption, impunity and the normalisation of coercion and criminality as tools of political competition. While the scope, intensity and resonance of these variables fluctuate over time, interviewee data implies they facilitate different modes of violence at a subnational level, as do the social responses to associated gaps in state reach, capacity and legitimacy. These problems can incentivise various experiments in local self-help, encouraging the emergence of alternative authority structures (whether bandit, criminal, extremist or vigilante), which are themselves liable to become vectors of instability. Bottom-up survival strategies and coping-mechanisms have, for instance, blurred the boundaries between licit and illicit behaviour, with communities reshaping social and economic norms in recognition of the constraints afflicting everyday life under the shadow of armed groups. In doing so, they have inadvertently shifted local perceptions and parameters of legitimate and illegitimate action further away from the national-legal definitions on which donors usually rely. 

Based on these findings, the authors have identified a range of policy recommendations for the donor community to consider. The first two were drawn from suggestions put forward by interviewees themselves:

• Spaces for dialogue and collaboration between civilians, state actors and security personnel may help to improve local confidence, reduce tensions, rebuild trust, increase transparency and help to instil a sense of ownership and responsibility among local people.
• Community members should be engaged in anti-corruption efforts, with bottom-up education and sensitisation campaigns accompanying top-down reforms. 

The authors also flag a series of wider implications and prescriptions to inform donor approaches in the future, while acknowledging the complex and challenging reality of navigating both local and national scepticism of external interventions and barriers to programming in certain no-go policy areas:

• Porous boundaries between licit and illicit economies complicate programming. Donors may find that focusing on behaviours rather than national-legal definitions of crime and terrorism is more sensitive (and relevant) to local understanding.
• Trust deficits must be overcome to facilitate meaningful community engagement with, and ownership of, donor programming. Distrust and social fragmentation may limit the efficacy of external interventions, highlighting the need for donors to address this trust deficit through consistent engagement to better mobilise community buy-in.
• The disconnect between local and national/international understandings of insecurity in northern Nigeria needs to be addressed. Poorly informed responses risk neglecting local realities, discounting community perspectives and overlooking informal structures of governance and legitimacy.
• Interventions should be integrated and cross-cutting, ensuring that different lines of effort are mutually reinforcing and commensurate with the system-level problems they are tackling.
• Progress is hampered by minimal political appetite for reform, which can limit donor agency to enact change. Incremental reform along with support for political, institutional and civic islands of integrity may yield more success than the exogenous imposition of anti-corruption initiatives.