ETHNIC AGITATIONS AND ARMS PROLIFERATION

THREATS TO NIGERIA’S NATIONAL SECURITY

Abstract

The Nigerian state is an amalgam of several constituent parts with peculiar religious, ethnic, historical, resource endowment, and socio-cultural attributes. Ordinarily, these peculiar attributes would have been a source of strength against all forms of threats. In any case, the ethnographical differences amongst the component parts of the country have become a threat rather than an asset to its corporate existence. For instance, ever since they were lumped together into a one political entity, all the ethnic nationalities in Nigeria have been in a perennial war of attrition for supremacy. This manifests in constant agitation for power shift/rotational presidency, secession, resource control, restructuring, and the Islamization of the country. These agitations have assumed a complex dimension as the agitators have resorted to the amassing of weapons of mass destruction which they employ in unleashing terror and mayhem despite several measures taken to stem the tide such as the National Political Conference held in 2014. This study therefore, interrogates the persistence of the ethnic agitations and arms proliferation in Nigeria with a view to exploring options to escaping the collapse of the Nigerian state. Both primary and secondary sources, such as interviews and documents were utilized in generating data which were subjected to a rigorous historical and empirical explanation of the frequency of arms proliferation and ethnic agitations in Nigeria. The study anchors on the weak state theory based on its contention that there is a strong link between institutional weakness and ethnic agitations that threaten the collapse of the Nigerian state. Against this backdrop, the study advocates the strengthening of arms control laws as a key to curbing ethnic agitations through a referendum to decide the terms of co-existence amongst the diverse ethnic nationalities in Nigeria.