Systole & Diastole
It is a hot, dry day in Africa’s most wealthy nation, Nigeria. A small contingent of soldiers mill about a checkpoint on a road running through the sub-saharan desert when, seemingly out of nowhere, there appear two women just a ways along the road and headed towards them. The women are walking strangely, with their arms held away from their bodies. As they come closer to the checkpoint the soldiers tell them to stop where they are. The response they receive to their demand brings a slight chill to the otherwise hot day, the women shout out: “[w]e are carrying bombs, we were forced to[!]”1 and they lift their shirts to show the suicide vests strapped beneath. It would be due to note, however, that this situation is not entirely alien to these soldiers. As a matter of fact, they are soldiers of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) and they are assigned to this post, in this area, as part of a counter force against the source of these bombs’ intent. You may wonder what sort of agency would deploy ‘non-determined’ suicide bombers in some sort of hopeful act of terror, and the answer is Boko Haram. Boko Haram is popularly understood as one of the world’s deadliest terrorist organizations. The group sprouted, and now thrives, in northern Nigeria and is fond of using women and children as human bombs to kill as many people as possible in an effort to overthrow the Nigerian government and install a Sharia Caliphate in place of it.2 This paper will argue that the Boko Haram and political corruption in Nigeria has become a cyclical storm of causation which will not be easily arrested. We will first look at the possessor of the state, the Nigerian government, and show the unrestful environment which it has bred, afterwhich we will come to examine that which has been bred within such an environment.
Nigeria is a state which sits upon a horde of wealth. Tin, iron ore, coal, limestone, niobium, natural gas, lead, zinc, arable land, and especially petroleum3 reserves perpetrate the nation and stoke the fires of its national wealth. 34% of Nigeria’s annual income is generated by its oil reserves alone. Sitting at the number one African nation by gross domestic product (GDP),4 even when considering the 177 million citizens which that wealth is --or should be-- spread across, Nigeria still sits in the top 20 African nations by GDP per capita.5 We can imagine that, even if underdeveloped, it should be progressing towards development quite nicely. Unfortunately this is far from the case.
What we actually find in Nigeria is that most of the wealth it generates is sucked up by corrupt political elites. This can be understood through the lens of the Rentier State Theory and the Resource Curse Thesis. The former conception describes a phenomenon where “resource abundance causes weak and predatory state institutions,”6 while the latter conception “claims that oil rents generate economic stagnation, authoritarianism, and heightened vulnerability to civil war.”6 Rentier Theory is a blatantly appropriate framework, for when looking at the data we find that between 2000 and 2014 there were 1,632 separate charges of high-profile corruption being processed in the Nigerian judicial system. These 1,632 charges were spread across 46 defendants, 13 of whom were governors of state, which represented 12 of 37 states within the country. In total these 46 individuals ‘mismanaged’ the Nigerian equivalent of 1.123 billion USD.7 We can imagine that actually much more corruption is going on than just that which these elites have been caught for. While this staggering amount of high-profile corruption, in itself, screams ‘Rentier Theory’, the fact that the corruption is being arrested and dealt with judicially suggests that at least some of the Nigerian institutions are running as they should. However, this assumption quickly deflates when finding out that:
Which leaves our rentier-framework standing strong in the face of such criticisms. This leads us to our consideration of the Resource Curse Thesis.
With so much corruption within the state it is perhaps plain to presume the effects of economic stagnation and authoritarian-esque politics, but it is actually the third qualification of the Resource Curse Thesis with which we will be most interested in in the case of Nigeria: increased vulnerability to civil war.
It is important to note that Boko Haram has gone through several distinct evolutions during its extant period. The Boko Haram with which we will be concerned is the fifth of five evolutions through progressive radicalization. It was in 2002 that Mohammed Yusuf radicalized the group, and one year later they were put to work in the political sphere under the thumb of Ali Modu Sherrif. Sherrif used the group both for strong-arming political opposition, as well as to have a large body of decided votes in his favour.9 Boko Haram worked with Sherrif with the promise that he would implement sharia law once elected in 2003. He failed to live up to his promise and the group came to embody their fourth incarnation alongside the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP). Still close with Sherrif, and also ANPP, Boko Haram would experience its most recent transformation seven years later in 2010 due to a severe straining of relations between themselves and Sherrif.9 This final incarnation is understood to be an embodiment of ‘pure terrorism.’ Now responsible for their own agenda, the terror group set their sights upon the politics and presidency of Goodluck Jonathan.9
Nigeria was formed by the British colonial-push through Africa, and thus its borders are not reflective of the demographics within. It is estimated that there are 250 distinct ethnic groups encompassed within the power structure of this contemporary state.10 And while this massive and complex array of distinctions certainly contributes to the turmoil of the political atmosphere, the true disquiet is manifested by --perhaps not surprisingly-- the differentiation of the Islamic North and the Christian South. These two groups truly struggle and strive, each for the other’s domination. This political contrast was, mistakenly, assumed to have been corrected for via an informal power-sharing arrangement where the North would hold power for eight years, followed by the South for eight.11 Unfortunately this arrangement spun out of control when the northerner Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died, unexpectedly, only three years into his supposed eight year hold of control. It was at this point that Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, contested the election and won, stealing power back from the North five years prior to the informally agreed upon reciprocation.11
It was precisely this ‘injustice’ which Boko Haram leveraged to truly embark upon its holy war in the country. The aims of the group are a harkening back to the 19th century Sokoto Caliphate, and the jihad orchestrated by Sheik Usman Dan Fodio. Fodio waged jihad upon the Hausa people and, in conquering them, installed a government, espousing sharia law, known as the Sokoto Caliphate, to rule the lands. The Sokoto Caliphate was an enormous political structure, covering an expanse of approximately 250,000 square miles all across northern Nigeria and parts of present-day Niger Republic.12 We can imagine this to be the kind of control, power, and reach that Boko Haram now thrives for in its own desire to dominate the southern, Christian, political arena and have sharia installed by the ‘true’ political elite, the Muslim North. Since the South is against entirely ceding their power and influence to a sharia caliphate of the Muslim North, we thus encounter our most prominent issue: the terror of Boko Haram and pursuant civil war, it is only now that we see clearly the qualification of the Resource Curse Thesis.
This informal power trading agreement, combined with the volatility of one towards the other (South towards North and vice versa), lays some particularly appropriate groundwork to begin to understand the essential nature of Nigerian corruption. The Christian South (and so too the Muslim North) only has eight years of prosperity before enduring eight years of political isolation. So those in power will certainly horde the wealth and power while it is in their hands. I know that if I could forsee a near-decade of coming hardship for my family, and I had access to wealth until that time came then I would certainly ensure I ‘set some aside’ to provide for them in the coming years.
The above-quoted seems to be the case in Nigeria. For it is not simply Boko Haram which clashes with the state from the North, but so too is the state clashed with by groups such as Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), from the South.14 Onwuegbuchulam argues that the oppression and subjugation inherent in the power structure from British-Colonialism has simply been left in place and adopted by the contemporary Nigerian political elites,15 causing an unsolicited degree of ethno-religious diversity which then leads to a complex inability to agree on any sort of coherent and universal national identity. It can be supposed that this lack of national cohesion is the causal root behind both the corrupt practices of the governing powers, as well as the emerging splinter states of the common populace.
And thus we begin to see the true difficulty within Nigeria, what is the need for a cohesive and universally respected Nigerian identity; which sharply conflicts with the various demographics’ intense desire to not be ‘Nigerian’ per say. We can imagine that a thriving state and economy could hold the potential to pull these various independent actors together in some semi-coherent manner, but what is actually occurring is a rather unfortunate case of politico-economic entropy. Business people are no longer interacting with one another, foreign investors and businesses are pulling out of these areas of volatility, and domestic workers are leaving their jobs in volatile areas and relocating to safer states; this is all due to a fear of being killed in public spaces with multiple people present.16 We can see some correlation between figures 1A and 1B in that between 2011 and 2016 violence trends up while GDP trends down. While it is difficult to argue that the politico-economic distress inherent within Nigeria’s borders are causing deficiencies in its Human Development Indices (HDI), it is more straightforward to argue that such distress is withholding the growth potential in HDI. The United Nations Human Development Report states that a “[l]ack of social cohesion is correlated with conflict and violence, especially in situations of unequal access to resources or benefits from natural wealth.”17 So the way forward from violence could be to level out the distribution of resources, thereby raising the HDI, in an effort to sooth radicalization and terror. But to redistribute the resources we would first need to quell political corruption. And to quell political corruption we would first need to redistribute the resources --circular necessity-- Thus I propose that the only way forward is to remove both sides of this wheel of causation at once, by abolishing the Nigerian state and allowing it to remake itself how the people desire. While there are clearly issues and concerns with the ‘Balkanization’ of Nigeria, I remain convinced that it is a rational route.
There are, of course, other ways to view the causal chain of the Nigerian quagmire. I have argued in favour of what might be considered a social constructivist approach that I shall term ‘social cyclicism’. This is based upon my line of argumentation that political corruption created the atmosphere and conditions appropriate for Boko Haram to develop, and whence developed Boko Haram reinforced the atmosphere and conditions appropriate for political corruption to thrive. So while one certainly came before the other, they have now begun to play off of, and reinforce, one another to such a degree that it would now be extremely difficult to separate one from the other in any sort of bloodless sense.
Another view of the matter is a Neo-Realist view, what is to suggest that the government is corrupt because the power (and money) is there to be taken and so they take it for the purposes of statism, self-help, and survival. Meanwhile Boko Haram thrives due to identical concerns: they feel that the state is threatening their way of life and so they attempt to seize back some control via the only self-help method they have available to them, terrorism.
We could also take a Post-Colonial view, what would be to consider that the 250 distinct ethnic groups within Nigeria combined with the multiple religious beliefs simply do not sum up to a coherent state unit. That the British were wrong to draw such arbitrary lines across the African continent to begin with, and that the world was wrong to keep those lines there after decolonization. This view, I believe would also support my recommendation for the ‘Balkanization’ of Nigeria.
The Corrupted Landlord
Nigeria is a state which sits upon a horde of wealth. Tin, iron ore, coal, limestone, niobium, natural gas, lead, zinc, arable land, and especially petroleum3 reserves perpetrate the nation and stoke the fires of its national wealth. 34% of Nigeria’s annual income is generated by its oil reserves alone. Sitting at the number one African nation by gross domestic product (GDP),4 even when considering the 177 million citizens which that wealth is --or should be-- spread across, Nigeria still sits in the top 20 African nations by GDP per capita.5 We can imagine that, even if underdeveloped, it should be progressing towards development quite nicely. Unfortunately this is far from the case.
What we actually find in Nigeria is that most of the wealth it generates is sucked up by corrupt political elites. This can be understood through the lens of the Rentier State Theory and the Resource Curse Thesis. The former conception describes a phenomenon where “resource abundance causes weak and predatory state institutions,”6 while the latter conception “claims that oil rents generate economic stagnation, authoritarianism, and heightened vulnerability to civil war.”6 Rentier Theory is a blatantly appropriate framework, for when looking at the data we find that between 2000 and 2014 there were 1,632 separate charges of high-profile corruption being processed in the Nigerian judicial system. These 1,632 charges were spread across 46 defendants, 13 of whom were governors of state, which represented 12 of 37 states within the country. In total these 46 individuals ‘mismanaged’ the Nigerian equivalent of 1.123 billion USD.7 We can imagine that actually much more corruption is going on than just that which these elites have been caught for. While this staggering amount of high-profile corruption, in itself, screams ‘Rentier Theory’, the fact that the corruption is being arrested and dealt with judicially suggests that at least some of the Nigerian institutions are running as they should. However, this assumption quickly deflates when finding out that:
[I]n all these cases of corruption none of the culprits is currently being detained or serving jail term . . . a clear indication of the failure of the Nigerian judiciary to prosecute politicians and ex-public officials. Even Ayo Fayose, who is a chief culprit on the list, has recently been re-elected as the governor of Ekiti state. Also, the inclusion of one of the most corrupt political office holders Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha in the ongoing national conference play down the seriousness of the government to fight corruption in high places. Giving these two scenarios where these offenders are not held accountable for their corrupt crimes, and are in fact rewarded with political appointments, corruption in Nigerian governance can therefore be described as a viper draining the blood of the Nigerian state.8
Which leaves our rentier-framework standing strong in the face of such criticisms. This leads us to our consideration of the Resource Curse Thesis.
The Rebellious Tenant
With so much corruption within the state it is perhaps plain to presume the effects of economic stagnation and authoritarian-esque politics, but it is actually the third qualification of the Resource Curse Thesis with which we will be most interested in in the case of Nigeria: increased vulnerability to civil war.
It is important to note that Boko Haram has gone through several distinct evolutions during its extant period. The Boko Haram with which we will be concerned is the fifth of five evolutions through progressive radicalization. It was in 2002 that Mohammed Yusuf radicalized the group, and one year later they were put to work in the political sphere under the thumb of Ali Modu Sherrif. Sherrif used the group both for strong-arming political opposition, as well as to have a large body of decided votes in his favour.9 Boko Haram worked with Sherrif with the promise that he would implement sharia law once elected in 2003. He failed to live up to his promise and the group came to embody their fourth incarnation alongside the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP). Still close with Sherrif, and also ANPP, Boko Haram would experience its most recent transformation seven years later in 2010 due to a severe straining of relations between themselves and Sherrif.9 This final incarnation is understood to be an embodiment of ‘pure terrorism.’ Now responsible for their own agenda, the terror group set their sights upon the politics and presidency of Goodluck Jonathan.9
The Unsigned Contract
Nigeria was formed by the British colonial-push through Africa, and thus its borders are not reflective of the demographics within. It is estimated that there are 250 distinct ethnic groups encompassed within the power structure of this contemporary state.10 And while this massive and complex array of distinctions certainly contributes to the turmoil of the political atmosphere, the true disquiet is manifested by --perhaps not surprisingly-- the differentiation of the Islamic North and the Christian South. These two groups truly struggle and strive, each for the other’s domination. This political contrast was, mistakenly, assumed to have been corrected for via an informal power-sharing arrangement where the North would hold power for eight years, followed by the South for eight.11 Unfortunately this arrangement spun out of control when the northerner Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died, unexpectedly, only three years into his supposed eight year hold of control. It was at this point that Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, contested the election and won, stealing power back from the North five years prior to the informally agreed upon reciprocation.11
It was precisely this ‘injustice’ which Boko Haram leveraged to truly embark upon its holy war in the country. The aims of the group are a harkening back to the 19th century Sokoto Caliphate, and the jihad orchestrated by Sheik Usman Dan Fodio. Fodio waged jihad upon the Hausa people and, in conquering them, installed a government, espousing sharia law, known as the Sokoto Caliphate, to rule the lands. The Sokoto Caliphate was an enormous political structure, covering an expanse of approximately 250,000 square miles all across northern Nigeria and parts of present-day Niger Republic.12 We can imagine this to be the kind of control, power, and reach that Boko Haram now thrives for in its own desire to dominate the southern, Christian, political arena and have sharia installed by the ‘true’ political elite, the Muslim North. Since the South is against entirely ceding their power and influence to a sharia caliphate of the Muslim North, we thus encounter our most prominent issue: the terror of Boko Haram and pursuant civil war, it is only now that we see clearly the qualification of the Resource Curse Thesis.
This informal power trading agreement, combined with the volatility of one towards the other (South towards North and vice versa), lays some particularly appropriate groundwork to begin to understand the essential nature of Nigerian corruption. The Christian South (and so too the Muslim North) only has eight years of prosperity before enduring eight years of political isolation. So those in power will certainly horde the wealth and power while it is in their hands. I know that if I could forsee a near-decade of coming hardship for my family, and I had access to wealth until that time came then I would certainly ensure I ‘set some aside’ to provide for them in the coming years.
Cultural Killing Fields
[T] he fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.13
The above-quoted seems to be the case in Nigeria. For it is not simply Boko Haram which clashes with the state from the North, but so too is the state clashed with by groups such as Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), from the South.14 Onwuegbuchulam argues that the oppression and subjugation inherent in the power structure from British-Colonialism has simply been left in place and adopted by the contemporary Nigerian political elites,15 causing an unsolicited degree of ethno-religious diversity which then leads to a complex inability to agree on any sort of coherent and universal national identity. It can be supposed that this lack of national cohesion is the causal root behind both the corrupt practices of the governing powers, as well as the emerging splinter states of the common populace.
And thus we begin to see the true difficulty within Nigeria, what is the need for a cohesive and universally respected Nigerian identity; which sharply conflicts with the various demographics’ intense desire to not be ‘Nigerian’ per say. We can imagine that a thriving state and economy could hold the potential to pull these various independent actors together in some semi-coherent manner, but what is actually occurring is a rather unfortunate case of politico-economic entropy. Business people are no longer interacting with one another, foreign investors and businesses are pulling out of these areas of volatility, and domestic workers are leaving their jobs in volatile areas and relocating to safer states; this is all due to a fear of being killed in public spaces with multiple people present.16 We can see some correlation between figures 1A and 1B in that between 2011 and 2016 violence trends up while GDP trends down. While it is difficult to argue that the politico-economic distress inherent within Nigeria’s borders are causing deficiencies in its Human Development Indices (HDI), it is more straightforward to argue that such distress is withholding the growth potential in HDI. The United Nations Human Development Report states that a “[l]ack of social cohesion is correlated with conflict and violence, especially in situations of unequal access to resources or benefits from natural wealth.”17 So the way forward from violence could be to level out the distribution of resources, thereby raising the HDI, in an effort to sooth radicalization and terror. But to redistribute the resources we would first need to quell political corruption. And to quell political corruption we would first need to redistribute the resources --circular necessity-- Thus I propose that the only way forward is to remove both sides of this wheel of causation at once, by abolishing the Nigerian state and allowing it to remake itself how the people desire. While there are clearly issues and concerns with the ‘Balkanization’ of Nigeria, I remain convinced that it is a rational route.
Other Considerations
There are, of course, other ways to view the causal chain of the Nigerian quagmire. I have argued in favour of what might be considered a social constructivist approach that I shall term ‘social cyclicism’. This is based upon my line of argumentation that political corruption created the atmosphere and conditions appropriate for Boko Haram to develop, and whence developed Boko Haram reinforced the atmosphere and conditions appropriate for political corruption to thrive. So while one certainly came before the other, they have now begun to play off of, and reinforce, one another to such a degree that it would now be extremely difficult to separate one from the other in any sort of bloodless sense.
Another view of the matter is a Neo-Realist view, what is to suggest that the government is corrupt because the power (and money) is there to be taken and so they take it for the purposes of statism, self-help, and survival. Meanwhile Boko Haram thrives due to identical concerns: they feel that the state is threatening their way of life and so they attempt to seize back some control via the only self-help method they have available to them, terrorism.
We could also take a Post-Colonial view, what would be to consider that the 250 distinct ethnic groups within Nigeria combined with the multiple religious beliefs simply do not sum up to a coherent state unit. That the British were wrong to draw such arbitrary lines across the African continent to begin with, and that the world was wrong to keep those lines there after decolonization. This view, I believe would also support my recommendation for the ‘Balkanization’ of Nigeria.
Conclusion
This has been quite the adventure throughout Nigeria’s past-history and also history in the making. We began by examining the corrupt practices of the Nigerian political elites, and suggested that the corruption paved the way for socio-political dissent among marginalized populations. We examined the burgeoning socio-political unrest that resulted being, primarily Boko Haram, but also IPOB and MASSOB. Touching upon the informal political power sharing arrangement between the Muslim North and Christian South it then became apparent why it was that this tedious balancing act fell tragically apart, being the unexpected death of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, and the subsequent usurpation of control by Goodluck Jonathan. And just previous to a brief consideration of other theoretical lenses we dipped our toes into the slightly more murky waters of theoretical appropriation, with which we were able to look at the tense and deeply interwoven relationship between politico-socio-cultural atmosphere, economics, and HDI which finally supposed my supposition that the forces at work in the entropic Nigerian desert have actually begun to play off of and reinforce one another to such a degree that they are no longer separable.
Figures
1A.18
1B.19
Notes
- Maclean
- Onwuegbuchulam, p. 76
- “Nigeria facts and figures”
- “List of African countries by GDP”
- “List of African countries by GDP per capita”
- Waldner, p. 2
- Bamidele, pp. 76 - 80
- Bamidele, p. 80
- Mbah, p. 182
- Mbah, p. 180
- Mbah, p. 178
- Adeleye, p. 3
- Onwuegbuchulam quoting The Clash of Civilizations thesis, p. 77
- Onwuegbuchulam, p. 76
- Onwuegbuchulam paraphrasing -Amadi 2007-
- Imhonopi, p. 32
- Human Development Report 2014, p. 19
- Moody
- Holodny
Bibliography
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Akanji, Olajide O. “The Problem of Belonging: The Identity Question and the Dilemma of Nation-Building in Nigeria”. African Identities: Vol. 9, Iss. 2, pp. 117 - 132. May 2011. DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2011.556788
Bamidele, Oluwaseum, Azeez O. Olaniyan, Bonnie Ayodele. “In the Cesspool of Corruption: The Challenges of National Development and the Dilemma of Anti-Graft Agencies in Nigeria”. African Social Science Review: Vol. 7: No. 1, Article 5, pp. 103 - 129. June 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/0169796X16653526
Holodny, Elena. “Nigeria is Headed for a ‘Full-Blown Economic Crisis’”. Business Insider. 22 May, 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/nigeria-gdp-head-into-full-blown-crisis-2016-5
“Human Development Report 2014: Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience”. United Nations Development Program. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr14-report-en-1.pdf
Imonohopi, David, Ugochukwu Moses Urim. “The Spectre of Terrorism and Nigeria’s Industrial Development: A Multi-Stakeholder Imperative”. African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: Vol. 9, Iss. 1, pp. 20 - 40. May 2009.
Onwuegbuchulam, Sunday Paul Chinazo, Khonldo Mtshali. “To Be or Not to Be? A Theoretical Investigation into the Crisis of National Identity in Nigeria”. Africa Today: Vol. 64, Iss. 1. pp. 74 - 92. Fall 2017. DOI: 10.2979/africatoday.64.1.04
“List of African countries by GDP”. Statistics Times. 22 February, 2017. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/african-countries-by-gdp.php
“List of African countries by GDP per capita”. Statistics Times. 22 February, 2017. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/african-countries-by-gdp-per-capita.php
Maclean, Ruth. “Dressed for Death: the Women Boko Haram Sent to Blow Themselves Up”. The Guardian. May 05, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/05/dressed-for-death-the-women-boko-haram-sent-to-blow-themselves-up
Mbah, Peter, Chikodiri Nwangwu, Herbert C. Edeh. “Elite Politics and the Emergence of Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria”. Trames: A Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 21: Iss. 2, pp. 173 - 190. 2017. https://doi.org/10.3176/tr.2017.2.06
Moody, James. “Trend 1: Rates of Violence in 2016”. Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. 18 January, 2017. https://www.acleddata.com/trend-1-rates-of-violence-in-2016/
“Nigeria facts and figures”. Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. 2017. http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/167.htm
Waldner, David, Benjamin Smith. N.p. 1 - 32. 17 August, 2013. http://www.benjaminbsmith.net/uploads/9/0/0/6/9006393/waldner.smith.oxford.chapter.pdf
Akanji, Olajide O. “The Problem of Belonging: The Identity Question and the Dilemma of Nation-Building in Nigeria”. African Identities: Vol. 9, Iss. 2, pp. 117 - 132. May 2011. DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2011.556788
Bamidele, Oluwaseum, Azeez O. Olaniyan, Bonnie Ayodele. “In the Cesspool of Corruption: The Challenges of National Development and the Dilemma of Anti-Graft Agencies in Nigeria”. African Social Science Review: Vol. 7: No. 1, Article 5, pp. 103 - 129. June 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/0169796X16653526
Holodny, Elena. “Nigeria is Headed for a ‘Full-Blown Economic Crisis’”. Business Insider. 22 May, 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/nigeria-gdp-head-into-full-blown-crisis-2016-5
“Human Development Report 2014: Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience”. United Nations Development Program. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr14-report-en-1.pdf
Imonohopi, David, Ugochukwu Moses Urim. “The Spectre of Terrorism and Nigeria’s Industrial Development: A Multi-Stakeholder Imperative”. African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: Vol. 9, Iss. 1, pp. 20 - 40. May 2009.
Onwuegbuchulam, Sunday Paul Chinazo, Khonldo Mtshali. “To Be or Not to Be? A Theoretical Investigation into the Crisis of National Identity in Nigeria”. Africa Today: Vol. 64, Iss. 1. pp. 74 - 92. Fall 2017. DOI: 10.2979/africatoday.64.1.04
“List of African countries by GDP”. Statistics Times. 22 February, 2017. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/african-countries-by-gdp.php
“List of African countries by GDP per capita”. Statistics Times. 22 February, 2017. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/african-countries-by-gdp-per-capita.php
Maclean, Ruth. “Dressed for Death: the Women Boko Haram Sent to Blow Themselves Up”. The Guardian. May 05, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/05/dressed-for-death-the-women-boko-haram-sent-to-blow-themselves-up
Mbah, Peter, Chikodiri Nwangwu, Herbert C. Edeh. “Elite Politics and the Emergence of Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria”. Trames: A Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 21: Iss. 2, pp. 173 - 190. 2017. https://doi.org/10.3176/tr.2017.2.06
Moody, James. “Trend 1: Rates of Violence in 2016”. Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. 18 January, 2017. https://www.acleddata.com/trend-1-rates-of-violence-in-2016/
“Nigeria facts and figures”. Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. 2017. http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/167.htm
Waldner, David, Benjamin Smith. N.p. 1 - 32. 17 August, 2013. http://www.benjaminbsmith.net/uploads/9/0/0/6/9006393/waldner.smith.oxford.chapter.pdf
