Insecurity and Implications of State Response on Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria

Abstract

Since 1999, Nigeria has been confronted with various security challenges, hence becoming one of the most concerned issues in the discourse of academics, state actors, security experts and the civil society organisations. This paper therefore investigates the dimensions of insecurity, state response and the implications for democratic consolidation in Nigeria.  Reciprocal Determinism Theory (RDT) provides the theoretical framework while information from secondary sources was employed in the analysis. Finding revealed that Nigeria’s democracy is being threatened due to her protracted insecurity challenges. State responses to these challenges suggest negative (-) and insensitive responses by the successive civilian regimes in Nigeria. This has had implications of disrupting elections, encouraging electoral violence, tainting transparency and election integrity due to the growing number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and weakening democratic institutions. The paper concludes that the state responses to myriad of security challenges have debilitating consequences on consolidating democracy in Nigeria. It is therefore recommended among others that there is need for prompt state response to these security challenges in order to consolidate democracy in Nigeria.