Chapter 8: Weaponizing Poverty: The Political Economy of Insecurity

"When you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent change inevitable." I first heard those words not in a history book but from a displaced farmer in Anka LGA, Zamfara State, in November 2023. He was sitting on a wooden bench in a camp for internally displaced persons, describing how his village had paid ransom three times before the bandits finally burned it to the ground. He did not know he was quoting John F. Kennedy. He thought he was stating the obvious. Around him, two hundred other displaced persons slept on mats in a primary school classroom that had been converted into an emergency shelter. There was one toilet for the entire compound. The government had not visited in six weeks. The camp chairman was a former PDP ward secretary who controlled the rice distribution.

Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group—from Boko Haram to pipeline vandals to ethnic militias—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force. But force requires recruits. And recruits, in the main, do not come from the children of governors or the wards of oil executives. They come from the reservoir of the abandoned. That reservoir is deeper than most Nigerians care to admit.

The Reservoir

In November 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics published its Multidimensional Poverty Index. The figure was staggering: 63% of Nigerians—approximately 133 million people—are multidimensionally poor. This is not monetary poverty alone, though that is severe enough. The MPI measures deprivation across health, education, and living standards. A child in Jigawa who has never seen a doctor, has never attended a formal school, and sleeps in a hut without electricity counts in this figure. So does a widow in Ebonyi who farms on eroded land, drinks from a contaminated stream, and has no access to sanitation. The 133 million are not a statistic. They are a constituency.

The geographic spread is uneven but the pattern is national. The North East records the highest poverty rate of any zone, with Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe among the poorest states. The North West follows close behind. The South-South, including the Niger Delta, shows lower monetary poverty but ranks high on deprivation in sanitation, electricity, and education. What this means is that the pipeline of desperation runs through every region, even those that appear prosperous on GDP maps. A young man in Port Harcourt with no clean water and no reliable power is not poor by income standards, but he is poor by the standards that determine whether he will listen to a militia recruiter or a political thug.

The MPI also reveals something else: poverty in Nigeria is not merely an absence of wealth. It is an absence of options. The multidimensionally poor cannot migrate easily because transport costs more than they earn in a week. They cannot access credit because they have no collateral and no banking history. They cannot appeal to courts because the courts are a hundred kilometres away and the magistrate demands a fee they cannot pay. They cannot vote out a local chairman who diverts constituency projects because the election is decided in the chairman's living room long before polling day. What they can do is sell the one asset they still possess: their labour, their loyalty, or their capacity for violence. This is the reservoir from which armed groups draw. It is not infinite, but it is replenished every year by budgets that allocate more to security than to education, and by economic policies that treat inflation as an abstraction rather than a death sentence.

The scale becomes visible when you travel. In Bayelsa State in 2023, I visited a community where the only source of drinking water was a brown stream shared with livestock. The community had no power grid connection, no secondary school within walking distance, and no road that could be navigated during the rainy season. Yet this was a state that received billions of naira in federal allocation annually. The money did not reach the stream. It reached the accounts of contractors who built roads that washed away in the first storm and clinics that opened without staff. The community had learned not to expect the state. They had learned to expect the armed group that arrived every few months promising protection from a rival group. Protection, in the political marketplace, is the only product the poor can reliably purchase, and they pay for it with their sons.

In Sokoto State in 2023, I met a woman named Hadiza who had lost two sons. One joined a bandit group after the family farm failed during the 2022 drought. The other was killed by the same group during a raid on a neighbouring village six months later. Hadiza did not blame the bandits, not entirely. She blamed the absence of any other pathway. "If there was work, would he have gone?" she asked. It was not a rhetorical question. It was an accounting. She was balancing her son's life against a job that did not exist.

The Political Marketplace

Alex de Waal, in his 2015 book The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, developed a framework he calls the "political marketplace." In this model, political power is not exercised through institutions and constitutions but through transactional relationships in which violence, loyalty, and money are exchanged in a continuous bargaining process. The state does not monopolize violence, as Max Weber theorized. Instead, it participates in a market where violence is a currency, and the state is merely the largest trader. De Waal developed this framework studying Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia. But when I read it in Maiduguri in 2019, I recognized Nigeria immediately.

Nigeria is a political marketplace in the precise sense that de Waal described. Consider the security vote. Every state governor receives a monthly allocation—unaccountable, unaudited, often running into hundreds of millions of naira—designated for security. In a functioning system, this would fund intelligence networks, community policing, and emergency response. In Nigeria's political marketplace, it funds patronage. A governor in the North West does not defeat banditry with his security vote. He manages it. He pays informants. He negotiates with warlords. He funds vigilante groups that answer to him personally rather than to any chain of command. The violence does not end. It is regulated, like a utility whose tariffs are negotiated between the politician and the gunman.

In Zamfara, this dynamic has been visible since 2019, when the state government under Governor Bello Matawalle initiated a programme of amnesty and cash payments to bandit leaders. The programme was controversial and ultimately failed, but its logic was pure political marketplace. The state was not buying peace. It was buying time—time to complete a tenure, time to secure a senatorial seat, time to negotiate the next election. The bandits, meanwhile, were not surrendering. They were diversifying their revenue streams, adding political payment to ransom and cattle rustling. Both sides understood the transaction. Neither side believed in the rhetoric that surrounded it.

SBM Intelligence, in a 2024 report on the economics of kidnapping, estimated that ransom payments across the North West totalled N4.8 billion cumulative for 2021-2023. This is the revenue line of a business, not the casualty count of a war. The bandits keep ledgers. They have chains of command. They negotiate prices. They even offer receipts, in some cases, to families who pay for the return of abducted relatives. The political marketplace does not distinguish between the state official who diverts a security contract and the bandit who splits ransom proceeds with a local informant. Both are rational actors operating in an economy where violence pays better than peace.

The same marketplace operates in the South. In the Southeast, the proliferation of "unknown gunmen" since 2021 has created a protection economy where businesses pay weekly levies to armed groups to avoid having their premises burned. In Anambra, traders at the Onitsha Main Market have described paying between N5,000 and N20,000 monthly to groups that operate with the knowledge of local authorities. The authorities do not stop the payments because the payments maintain a threshold of violence low enough to allow commerce to continue. In Lagos, the National Union of Road Transport Workers extracts levies from drivers at every major motor park, and a portion of that revenue flows upward into political campaigns. The methods differ. The logic is identical. Violence, or the threat of it, generates revenue. Revenue purchases loyalty. Loyalty secures office. Office controls the budget. The cycle closes.

In the Middle Belt, the marketplace takes a different form. The herder-farmer conflict that has devastated Benue, Plateau, and Nasarawa since 2018 has generated its own economy of displacement. Land that farmers abandon becomes available for speculative purchase by urban elites at fractions of its value. Politicians who control the allocation of relief materials to IDP camps become gatekeepers to survival. A bag of rice distributed in a camp in Barkin Ladi carries the name of a senator who has never visited the camp but whose re-election depends on the photograph of that bag. The violence creates the displacement. The displacement creates the aid. The aid creates the patronage. The patronage creates the vote. The vote returns the senator. The senator returns to Abuja. The camp remains.

De Waal argues that political marketplaces become stable when the cost of buying loyalty is lower than the cost of building institutions. Nigeria has spent decades perfecting this arithmetic. A functioning school in a rural community costs more than paying a militant leader to keep his boys quiet during elections. Agricultural extension services cost more than importing rice and blaming smugglers for the price. A hospital costs more than a flight to London and a prescription for the constituents to manage with patent medicine stores. The political marketplace rewards those who manage crises, not those who solve them. A solved crisis is a lost revenue stream. An educated population is a constituency that asks questions. A healthy population is a workforce that demands wages. An empowered population is a electorate that cannot be bought with N2,000 and a bag of rice. The marketplace has no use for any of these.

The Macroeconomic Accelerant

If the political marketplace is the structure, the macroeconomic crisis of 2023-2024 was the accelerant. In May 2024, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that national inflation had reached 33.95%, the highest level in 28 years. Food inflation stood at 40.53%. The naira had depreciated by more than 90% year-on-year. These are not numbers on a central bank slide. They are the difference between a family eating twice daily and once daily, between a child attending school and dropping out to hawk sachet water on a highway median, between a young man waiting for a job and a young man picking up a weapon because the weapon comes with a monthly stipend.

The fuel subsidy removal in June 2023 compounded the shock. Transport costs doubled in some states within weeks. Farmers could not afford to move produce to market. The price of fertilizer, already high, became prohibitive. In Kano, millers reported that the cost of grinding maize rose by 60% between June and December 2023. In rural Benue, families returned to eating wild tubers they had abandoned a generation ago. In Lafia, Nasarawa State, a bag of cement that cost N4,000 in early 2023 cost N11,000 by March 2024. A roof that could not be repaired in the dry season would leak in the rainy season, and a leaking roof meant respiratory infections that the clinic could not treat because the clinic had no drugs.

The naira depreciation completed the destruction. By March 2024, the exchange rate had fallen from roughly N460 to the dollar to over N1,500 on the parallel market. For a country that imports everything from refined petroleum to pharmaceuticals to school textbooks, this was catastrophic. A course of antibiotics that cost N3,000 in 2022 cost N12,000 by early 2024. A family sending a child to a private university found the fees tripling mid-year because the institution priced its costs in dollars. A trader importing spare parts for his workshop in Onitsha discovered that his capital, held in naira, could no longer cover a single container. The middle class, already thin, was evaporating. And those who had never been middle class were falling through a floor that had been their ceiling.

Inflation on this scale does not merely impoverish. It radicalizes. It tells a 22-year-old graduate that his degree is worthless. It tells a farmer that his harvest belongs to the trader with the truck, not to him. It tells a mother that her child will not eat tomorrow because of a policy decision made in Abuja by people whose children school in London. And it tells a young man in Katsina or Zamfara or Borno that the only employer hiring is the man with the gun.

The food security data completed the picture. FEWS NET, in its June 2024 to January 2025 outlook, projected that Crisis (IPC Phase 3) and Emergency (IPC Phase 4) outcomes would persist in the North East, North West, and North Central states. By early 2025, humanitarian agencies estimated that over 8 million Nigerians faced acute food insecurity. In inaccessible LGAs in Borno—Abadam, Bama, Guzamala, Marte—Emergency outcomes were already documented. But the hunger was not confined to the Northeast. In Sokoto, in Zamfara, in Katsina, communities that had never required food aid were lining up at distribution points. In Kano, the Dala and Gwale LGAs reported malnutrition rates among children under five that approached emergency thresholds. The reservoir was not just full. It was overflowing.

What makes this a political economy problem rather than a humanitarian one is the response. The Federal Government launched a series of palliative programmes—cash transfers, grain releases, fertilizer subsidies—but the distribution was politicized and the quantities insufficient. In December 2024, the House of Representatives began an investigation into the diversion of 3,000 metric tonnes of rice intended for Borno IDPs. The rice had been redirected to markets in Maiduguri and sold at commercial prices. Even hunger, in the political marketplace, is a commodity. The warehouse where the rice was stored belonged to a contractor who had received six similar emergency supply contracts in three years. His company had no website, no listed address, and no employees visible on social media. But his invoices were always paid.

The Recruitment Pipeline

In 2017, the United Nations Development Programme published Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment. The study interviewed former members of violent extremist groups across the continent. Among respondents who had joined Boko Haram, 52% had Quranic education only. Another 17% had no education at all. Only a minority had completed secondary school or higher. The UNDP researchers were careful not to claim that education prevents radicalization. What they demonstrated was that the absence of education—combined with the absence of economic opportunity—creates a vulnerability that recruiters exploit with precision.

The temptation is to read these figures as a Northeast problem, a Boko Haram problem. That would be a mistake. The same profile fits recruits across Nigeria's conflict zones. In Zamfara, bandit commanders have been documented recruiting from Almajiri populations—young boys sent to Quranic schools who end up begging on streets, detached from family networks, invisible to the state. The Almajiri system, which houses an estimated 10 million children across northern Nigeria, is not a religious institution in any meaningful sense. It is a system of abandonment in which children are released by parents too poor to feed them, into the care of teachers too poor to teach them, in a society too indifferent to count them. A 12-year-old Almajiri who begs for food from dawn to dusk does not need an ideology to pick up a gun. He needs a meal.

In the Southeast, separatist militias have drawn members from the ranks of unemployed graduates and roadside mechanics who see no future in a Nigerian state that has offered them nothing. In Lagos, cult groups recruit from the same pool of out-of-school youth that the UNDP identified. In Jos, ethnic militias on both sides of the divide have enrolled teenagers who dropped out of school after the 2023 attacks on their communities. The ideology changes with the geography. The economics do not. A young man with no education, no skills, and no prospects is a blank cheque that any armed group can cash.

A former combatant I interviewed in Maiduguri in 2022—he had left Boko Haram in 2019 and was working as a motorcycle repairman—described his recruitment in terms that would have been familiar to the Zamfara farmer I met a year later. "There was no work. My father was dead. My mother could not farm because of the violence. They came offering 15,000 naira monthly and food for my family. The government offered nothing." He did not mention religious ideology until I asked. His primary motivation was arithmetic. The insurgency paid. The state did not. He stayed for three years, rose to a mid-level position, and left only when he realized that the commanders were keeping the foreign exchange while the foot soldiers took the bullets. Even his disillusionment was economic, not theological.

The pipeline operates with mechanical precision. In Zamfara, recruiters target the weekly markets where Almajiri boys gather to beg. They offer immediate cash, a phone, and the promise of regular meals. In the Southeast, they target motor parks and betting shops where unemployed graduates spend their days. They offer a different narrative—one of ethnic pride and historical grievance—but the economics are the same. In Lagos, cult groups recruit from the ranks of street vendors and bus conductors, offering protection from police harassment in exchange for loyalty and occasional violence. The product varies by region. The supply chain is identical. It begins with a state that does not educate, does not employ, and does not protect. It ends with a young man holding a weapon he never learned to use in any classroom.

This is not to say that ideology is irrelevant. It is to say that ideology is affordable only when poverty has done the initial work. A well-fed population with schools and clinics and prospects does not produce 133 million potential recruits. A population with nothing to lose produces them in abundance. The armed groups know this. They do not create the conditions of deprivation. They inherit them, and they rent them back to the state at a markup.

The Arithmetic of Disorder

Here is a calculation that no finance minister has delivered in a budget speech. The World Bank has estimated, in various development updates, that Nigeria loses approximately $10 billion annually to conflict. This is an estimate with wide confidence intervals, and it should be treated with caution. But even as a rough order of magnitude, it tells a story. Nigeria's annual security budget is approximately $3.5 billion. The country spends $3.5 billion to manage a crisis that costs $10 billion. The gap—$6.5 billion—is borne by destroyed farms, abandoned schools, diverted investment, and lost lives that never appear on a ledger.

But the arithmetic looks different depending on where you sit. For a politician with a security vote, the crisis is revenue. For a security contractor with a pipeline protection contract, the crisis is a business model. For an importer of subsidized fertilizer who resells it at market rates, the crisis is an opportunity. The $10 billion loss is not distributed evenly. It falls on farmers who cannot plant, on traders who cannot travel, on mothers who cannot feed their children. The $3.5 billion security budget, meanwhile, is concentrated in the hands of a small network of officials, contractors, and brokers who have no incentive to make themselves redundant.

Consider the community policing initiatives that have proliferated across Nigeria. The Civilian Joint Task Force in Borno, formed in 2013, began as a volunteer neighbourhood watch. By 2024, its members were receiving stipends, equipment, and in some cases, immunity from prosecution for abuses documented by human rights organizations. The group had become a stakeholder in the conflict economy. Disband it, and thousands of young men lose their income. Keep it, and the abuses continue. This is the political marketplace in miniature. A problem creates a budget. The budget creates a constituency. The constituency resists the solution because the solution means unemployment.

Or consider the arms procurement budget. Between 2015 and 2023, Nigeria spent billions of dollars on military hardware, much of it sourced through opaque contracts. In 2022, the House of Representatives investigated allegations that arms purchased for the anti-insurgency war were diverted to unknown buyers. The investigation was quietly shelved. No public report was issued. The budget line remained. The weapons, in many cases, did not reach the front lines. But the contracts were paid. In the political marketplace, the payment is the point. The weapon is incidental.

There is a reason why the same contractors win emergency security contracts across multiple states, year after year, regardless of their performance. There is a reason why a company that failed to deliver patrol vehicles in Borno can win a similar contract in Zamfara six months later. There is a reason why the security budget grows every year while the number of checkpoints multiplies and the number of safe roads shrinks. The budget is not designed to produce security. It is designed to produce a class of people who depend on insecurity for their livelihood. Remove the bandits, and the security contractors have no clients. Remove the insurgents, and the defence advisers have no briefs. Remove the poverty, and the politicians have no desperation to trade for votes. The system does not fail. It succeeds at what it was built to do.

There is a reason why no Nigerian government has ever fully implemented a poverty reduction programme that works. It is the same reason why no state has successfully prosecuted a major contractor for failed security projects. The system is not broken. For those who profit from it, the system is working exactly as designed. The only failure is the failure of the poor to understand their role in the arithmetic. They are not the beneficiaries of governance. They are the raw material.

The Objection

Not every analyst accepts the weaponization framework. Dr. Zainab Usman, Director of the Africa Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued in her 2022 book Nigeria's Economic Transition: The Political Economy of Transformation that the "resource curse" narrative obscures a more precise diagnosis. The problem, she writes, is not oil wealth per se but the political settlement that distributes it. Nigeria's elites have constructed a system in which resource rents are shared among regional power brokers through federal allocation, patronage appointments, and contract kickbacks. This settlement is stable not because it is just but because it is profitable for those inside it. Poverty persists not because elites are incompetent but because the current distribution of power rewards those who can control votes and violence, not those who can build schools and clinics.

Dr. Usman's framework shifts the blame from abstract "governance failure" to concrete "elite bargain." The weaponization of poverty, in her reading, is not a conspiracy but an equilibrium. No single politician wakes up planning to keep his constituents hungry. But the collective effect of millions of individual decisions—each rational, each self-interested—is a nation where 133 million people are multidimensionally poor and the elite class lives behind higher walls, sends its children to universities abroad, and shops in Dubai while its constituents choose between medicine and food.

Security sector analysts offer a further caution. The poverty-recruitment correlation, they note, is statistical, not deterministic. Most poor Nigerians do not join armed groups. Many armed group members are not poor; some commanders are university graduates, and several have backgrounds in business or government. Other factors—identity, ideology, coercion, opportunism—matter equally. To reduce every insurgent to an economic victim is to rob him of agency and to underestimate the complexity of the crises Nigeria faces. The bandit leader in Zamfara who negotiates with politicians is not merely a poor man with a gun. He is a political entrepreneur operating in a marketplace that the state itself created. He has chosen his path, and he profits from it handsomely.

These objections do not disprove the weaponization thesis. They refine it. Poverty is not the sole cause of violence. But it is the condition that makes violence sustainable. A Boko Haram without recruits dies. A banditry economy without ransom payers collapses. A political marketplace without buyers and sellers of loyalty ceases to function. The 133 million poor are not all potential fighters. But they are the sea in which the fighters swim, and without that sea, the fish would not survive.

What Nigerians themselves have built in response to this system is the subject of the next chapter. But before turning to those architectures of coexistence, it is worth naming the thing we are up against. The insecurity that plagues Nigeria is not a natural disaster. It is not a tribal inheritance. It is a political economy with a balance sheet, a board of directors, and a business plan. And the business plan depends on keeping the reservoir full.

Poverty is not a failure of Nigerian governance. For some, it is the product. And like any product, it has suppliers, distributors, and customers who would resist its removal.

Sources

1. National Bureau of Statistics, 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index Report, November 2022. The figure of 63% (133 million Nigerians) multidimensionally poor is drawn from this official survey.
2. National Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index Report, May 2024. Inflation recorded at 33.95%; food inflation at 40.53%.
3. FEWS NET, Nigeria Food Security Outlook, June 2024 – January 2025. Projected Crisis (IPC Phase 3) and Emergency (IPC Phase 4) outcomes across multiple states; over 8 million Nigerians facing acute food insecurity as of early 2025 per humanitarian agency estimates cited in Peace News Network and related relief sector reporting.
4. United Nations Development Programme, Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment, 2017. The education breakdown among Boko Haram respondents (52% Quranic education only, 17% no formal education) is documented in this study.
5. World Bank, Nigeria Development Update (various editions) and related conflict economics estimates. The figure of approximately $10 billion in annual losses to conflict is a World Bank estimate with wide confidence intervals and should be treated as indicative rather than precise.
6. Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power, Cambridge University Press, 2015. The "political marketplace" framework is developed in this work and applied here to the Nigerian context.
7. SBM Intelligence, The Economics of Kidnapping in Nigeria, 2023/2024. Cumulative ransom payments across the North West estimated at N4.8 billion for 2021-2023.
8. Dr. Zainab Usman, Nigeria's Economic Transition: The Political Economy of Transformation, Oxford University Press / Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2022. The critique of the "resource curse" narrative and the emphasis on political settlement analysis are drawn from this work.
9. Nigeria House of Representatives, investigations into diversion of palliative rice supplies, December 2024. Proceedings reported in Premium Times and The Cable.
10. Nigeria House of Representatives, investigations into arms procurement diversion allegations, 2022. No final public report was issued; the investigation was shelved without published findings.