Corruption, urbanization, and insecurity in Nigeria: unraveling the nexus and pathways to national stability

This study investigates the nexus between corruption and insecurity in Nigeria from 1994 to 2022, focusing on how urbanization and political stability influence the country’s security landscape. Secondary data were sourced from the World Development Indicators and the CBN’s Statistical Bulletin. Insecurity was modeled as the dependent variable, with corruption, urbanization, and political stability serving as independent variables. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique was employed to analyze both short- and long-term dynamics. The ARDL bound test reveal a long-run relationship among the variables. Corruption was discovered to have a positive but not significant effect on insecurity in the short and long run, this is due to the fact that corruption is institutional in nature and it undermines the efficacy of law enforcement and governance. Political stability positively influenced insecurity but with no short-term impact but is important in the long term, possibly because stable government takes time to generate better security results. Urbanization contributes importantly to increased insecurity, with positive signs in both the short and long run, possibly because fast urbanization outruns available infrastructure and increases socioeconomic inequalities. The study concludes that corruption is at the epicenter of increasing insecurity in Nigeria, followed by urbanization and long-term political stability. Therefore, efforts to enhance national security should primarily be directed towards anti-corruption, complemented by managing urbanization and establishing long-term political stability to initiate lasting security improvements.