Corruption and Insecurity: The Impetus of Underdevelopment in Nigeria

Since achieving its independence in 1960, Nigeria has struggled almost incomparably to achieve a measure of economic stability and realize its projected economic potential. Through successive regime changes from 1966, the Country alternatively swung from Civilian to Military rule until democracy and relative political stability was eventually restored in 1999. Nonetheless, the challenge of underdevelopment has endured throughout this period. Despite posting impressive figures via economic indicators and boasting what is now regarded as Africa‟s biggest economy, Nigerians still rank among the World‟s poorest people as the wealth of the nation miserably fails to reflect on the vast majority of its people. Several reasons have been nominated for this apparently inexplicable disparity between the Macro-economic and Micro-economic fortunes of the State, ranging from the tartuffery of the Colonial powers to sheer widespread incompetence that permeates society today. However, corruption and insecurity remain the most salient reasons underlying Nigeria‟s lack of development. Together, these twin-evils have become deeply entrenched at the base of the Nigerian social culture and have come to straddle the normative ethical distinction between right and wrong. This paper is aimed at investigating the Nigerian underdevelopment problem with the goal of identifying the causal factors that stunt political and economic efforts at development. The paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter introduces the topic and key terms; the second chapter reviews the literature and notes some of the most notable scholarly contributions to the subject matter. The third chapter gives a robust historical analysis of the State with respect to the topic. This chapter enlightens the reader on the historical background on which this research is carried out. The fourth chapter conveys the Constructivist insights into the underdevelopment problem in Nigeria, in this chapter a thorough data analysis is carried out in order to validate the insistence on corruption and insecurity as primary causal factors. The fifth chapter contains the summaries, conclusions and predictions. Keywords: Underdevelopment, Corruption, Insecurity, Constructivism