DIALECTICAL ON RURAL POVERTY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS TO THE SPIRALLING INSECURITY IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Poverty has become a major socio-economic problem in Nigeria. The dialectical relationship between rural poverty and insecurity in Nigeria presents one of the most critical developmental challenges in modern times. Nigeria is blessed with vast natural and human resources, yet rural poverty has deepened alarmingly, with multidimensional poverty index rising to an all-time high of 63% among the population in 2022108. Therefore, this paper adopts dialectical materialism as its analytical prism to interrogate how the antithetical conditions of mass rural deprivation and few elite accumulations produce, sustain, and intensify the spiraling scale of insecurity in Nigeria. Thus, drawing from a critical review of array of secondary sources on unemployment, underdevelopment, banditry, insurgency, militancy and terrorism, the study argues that rural poverty is both a cause and consequence of insecurity, locked in a ripple of a self-reinforcing cycle. The study concludes that breaking the dialectical cycle requires a holistic and poverty eradication strategy/method, that confronts the structural contradictions of class struggle and dominance, inept governance, and the neoliberal neglect of the state for the provision of rural infrastructure.