Beyond Arms and Armaments: Resolving Nigeria’s Insurgency Crisis through Strategic Public Relations

Since the first known manifestation of insurgency in Nigeria credited to a university student of Niger Delta extraction, Isaac Japer Adaka Boro in 1965, Nigeria’s insurgency crisis has precariously grown in scope and sophistication. There seems to be an intensifying thirst for blood and a spiraling preference for violence as means of expressing pent-up frustration or anger either directed at the state or its people. The conflagration has taken a hefty toll on the soul of Nigeria. This study sought to: examine the nature and causes of Nigeria’s insurgency, determine the ideological motivations fueling it, profile the perpetrators of the insurgency, and propose functional public relations strategies for resolving the crisis. The desktop research method was used to qualitatively analyse extant data and literature. Relying on Stakeholder theory and Invitational Rhetoric theory, the paper argues that the enduring solution to Nigeria’s insurgency rests not in arms and armaments. It identifies lack of mutual trust, shared understanding and absence of a sense of corporate existence as fundamental to the crisis. The study theorises that there would be no need for a fight if Nigeria is administered using the strategic crisis communication template of a corporate organisation, where parts of the whole appreciate their roles and responsibilities and contribute according to rules towards attainment of pre-determined and consensually agreed goals. The study recommends the non-kinetic deployment of public relations strategies such as lobbying, dialogue, persuasive engagement, crisis communication, stakeholding, invitational rhetoric, in resolving Nigeria’s protracted insurgency crisis, in the interest of all.