Poverty and Crimes in Nigeria: Indices of Governance Failure (original) (raw)
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The International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 2011
Crime is a universally phenomenon that is threatening the security of various countries in varying degrees. The causes of criminal activities also vary from one nation to another. In Nigeria, political and business crime rate is on the increase almost on a daily basis, and it is difficult to point figures at the direction of the twin evils that left the country prostrate economically, politically, and socially. The objectives of this paper are to examine the various criminal activities in Nigeria and identify what can be done to minimize its spread in order to safeguard Nigerian Democracy from total collapse. The paper concludes that since crime has become endemic in Nigeria System such that there is hardly anything that could be done without gratification. Government and decision makers must therefore genuinely as matter of policy shift its thinking about crime and punishment and turn its focus to crime prevention, addressing the root causes of crime such as lack of employment whic...
TREND ANALYSIS OF POVERTY AND URBAN CRIME IN NIGERIA SINCE 1999 ALIYU MUKHTAR KATSINA
This paper analyzes the impact of poverty on social crime in urban areas in Nigeria. It attempts to link the spread of urban crime to three important variables. These are bad governance, poverty, and inequality. The choice of Nigeria as the case study is informed by several considerations. The first and the most important is that it has been always assumed that democracy promotes good governance and social equality; the two components that are necessary for addressing urban crime. Nigeria's failure in this regard provides an interesting lesson through which the phenomenon of urban crime can be studied, its causes analyzed, and its effects revealed. The period covered is between 1999 when democracy was restored to the present. In the final analysis it is shown that bad governance, poverty, and social inequality are responsible for the spread of urban crime in the country over the last twelve years.
Identifying Major Causes, Effects and Approaches to Curbing Crimes in South-Western Nigeria
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The thrust of this study was to identify the major causes and effects of crimes in SouthWestern Nigeria. It was discovered that the once peaceful region of the country is gradually becoming the crime capital, losing lives and properties worth millions on yearly basis to the recurrent cases of crimes. Data were generated from both primary and secondary sources and tested with Pearson Product Moments Correlation Coefficient at 0.01 level of significance, through the use of SPSS. Findings revealed that there is a positive correlation between unresponsive government and increase crimes in SouthWestern Nigeria which has led to business shutdown, poor economic development among others. The study concludes that if adequate measures to curb these crimes are not urgently taken, more lives will be lost, businesses will continue to foldup, investors will withdraw their investments, poverty and hunger will take over and life will become more unbearable for the common man. Some of the recommendations of this study includes; youth empowerment, job creation, resource control, meeting of students' demands and the strengthening of the Nigerian educational systems at all levels, as well as provisions for good ranching systems and laws to protect both herdsmen and farmers within the region.
The Criminal Justice System as Enablement for Social Order in Nigeria
The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology
The place of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) in ensuring and sustaining social order in any country has been long established especially with the understanding that norms, rules, and laws act as social adhesives for society. However, some countries in the developing world seem to be grappling with significant challenges associated with criminal justice delivery as a consequence of the real and perceived inefficiency of the CJS in dealing with deviant issues. This to a large extent tend to undermine social order and by extension the collective conscience of the people. In Nigeria, criminal justice issues have attracted strong theoretical and practical affronts with the dominant perspective being that the poor are often denied justice in favour of the rich with adverse implications for social order. As a result, this paper examined the issue of the CJS in order to show how this affects social order in Nigeria. The paper adopts the content analysis method for data gathering and the q...
Conflict and Crime in the Society: A Bane to Socio-Economic Development in Nigeria
Studies in Sociology of Science, 2013
Just like conflict, crime is functional and pervasive as no unit of society is totally free and spared of it woes and throes when it occurs. The way the polity is organized can create both root causes and conditions favourable to negative conflict with its attendants consequences. Societies like Nigeria and other developing countries; where corruption and corrupt practices are heralded, politicians are above the law and the unfit are preferred in positions cannot possibly escape intractable violence and destructive conflict which arguably can undo economic, political and social gains of country and scare potential investors. Two theories (conflict and functional) were considered to explain the phenomena of conflict and crime. The findings reveals that the primary beneficiaries in conflict situations are politicians (they provide arms and fund conflictants); and poverty was seen as another reason for the meteoric rise of conflict and crime in Nigeria. They study made some recommendations among which includes; the existing legislations on conflict and crime as provided in the criminal code should be implemented and culprit punished and vexed issues should be amicably redress through the court, council of chiefs and elders as it is done in African traditional setting.
International Journal of Health Economics and Policy, 2019
The study examined the determinants of crimes in Nigeria from economic and socioeconomic perspectives: A macro-level analysis using a time series data covering the period of 1990 to 2014. Both economic and socioeconomic factors that determinant crime were included in the model. The economic factors include GDP per capita; male unemployment rate; female unemployment rate and poverty rate while the socioeconomic-demographic factors include higher education enrolment; urban population and rural population. The study embraces the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to empirically analyze the model since the variables were stationary at levels I(0) and first difference I(1). The empirical results in the long-run indicated that gross domestic product per capita and female unemployment rate was found to have a negative significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria while urban and rural population, male and female unemployment rate were found to have a positive significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria. Also, the results of the short-run indicated that gross domestic product per capita and higher education was found to have a negative significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria while urban population, male unemployment rate and poverty rate were found to have a positive significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria in the short-run. Therefore, for a country like Nigeria to reduce criminal activities in the country, there must be an increase in the income of the people. Also, government should invest more in education because it makes the people more rational and more risk averse and so it reduces the propensity to commit crimes. Therefore, higher education attainment will be the cure for criminal activities in Nigeria. Government should also create more jobs because high unemployment rates will compel people to commit crimes and this will increase crime rate in Nigeria. Lastly, there should be high budgetary provision towards poverty alleviation programme because higher poverty may lead to higher crimes rate due to depression or mental illness associated with being poor and this will decreases the rate of return of legal activities and more likely to increase return of illegal activities.
Time to Reform Nigeria's Criminal Justice System
This paper examines the performance of Nigeria's criminal justice system, using quantitative and qualitative indicators. An effective criminal justice system is one of the key pillars upon which the concept of the rule of law is built because it serves as a functional mechanism to redress grievances and bring violators of social norms to justice, and how well a country manages its criminal justice system affects its overall performance on the governance index. Unfortunately, the Nigerian criminal justice system is fundamentally flawed and the defects manifest at every processing point on the entire criminal justice system line. This paper finds that the failure of governance institutions to design a suitable criminal justice policy, the inability of the legislature to appropriately transform policies into laws, an oddly designed judicial system, an outdated and counterproductive style of policing and a correctional services that inhumanely warehouses those considered 'innocent' by the very law of the society that imprisons them are the factors that have collectively rendered the system out of sync with contemporary global best practices in criminal justice system administration.
The Police and Crime Management in Nigeria: Implications for National Development
2020
In Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, the police maintain good order for proper functioning of things. To do this, the police are guided by law especially; section 214 of the 1999 Constitution that recognised the police as the frontline agency to guarantee internal security. Section 4 of the 2004 Police Act and Regulations, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, described the police basic functions as prevention and detection of crime; protection of lives and properties; and apprehension and prosecution of offenders among others. Besides, sections 2, 3, and 7 of the Criminal Code, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 1976 defined crime, categorised crime, and described parties to crime respectively. This paper examined the relationship between the police crime management and national development. Data were sourced from relevant textbooks, journals, newspapers, and magazines. Descriptive and analytical methods were used to analyse the data. Using the Principles of Law Enforcement as the theoretic...