Governance and Insecurity Nexus in Nigeria Since 1999 The Place of Leadership

Abstract

Governance issues like jaundiced leadership, corruption, and poverty- all of which have triggered insecurity, are increasingly becoming the norm in Africa. While most leadership is paying lip service to the fight against these menaces, the followership has not only resigned to fate but also contribute their quota in worsening the situation through various acts of criminality. The paper broadly takes a look at how governance issues, political and leadership challenges, have been contributory factors to insecurity in Nigeria. It contends that weak or destructive governance is sometimes the source of insecurity. It also makes the case that, the insecurity-governance link takes various forms, and it points to the centrality of the variable of good leadership, as a panacea. In the midst of that, study also finds that the state-society gap is a central challenge for Nigerian governance. It, therefore, recommends that the political leadership in the country needs to build a social contract that is sufficiently inclusive to permit the management of diversity in the country. The theoretical foundation of the work was based on the Systems Theory by David Easton. Methodologically, the study adopted the content analysis as its research tool to explain the study.