Nnadiebube Journal of Religion, Culture and Society

Insecurity in Nigeria has since reached a crisis point. For more than three decades, the country has been mired in various forms of security challenges –militancy, kidnapping, insurgence, mass murder, religious intolerance and so on. This situation has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives within this period and the dangers of losing more are far from being abated. In as much as the volatility of the situation hit climax at different times and in different parts of the country, there is no region that has not had its fair share of the crisis. This work is founded on the idea that the various efforts made to contain or deal with insecurity in the country failed. It identifies this failure with the chimerical nature of the Nigerian arrangement. In other words, the work builds on the hypothesis that the denial of the naturality of the ethnic formations in the country by a phantasmal Nigeria with which citizens hardly identify constitutes the fundamental reason why every Nigerian project is bound to fail. The work went ahead to construct the ‘Ethnocentric Option’ by re-examining the efforts made by various individual ethnicity in combatting insecurity in the country and proffering that option as the most effective in dealing with the situation of insecurity in Nigeria. The work contributes to the wide-range of discussions about insecurity both in Nigeria and the globe; presenting a model out of an arrangement which ordinarily will be termed retrogressive. The work will review the ethnic composition of the country together with the advancement into geo-political zoning, the Nigerian security architecture together with regional security arrangement, evaluation of the effectiveness of regional security arrangement and the endorsement of the ethnocentric option. To get the best out of the data for this research, the work combines the methods of ethnography and case study with analysis of written data and focus on groups.

Open Full Text (PDF)