Chapter one

Introduction

1.1 Background of the study

Over the past five decades, Nigeria has been governed by both democratic and non-democratic governments. The Nigerian military’s incursion into politics in the country had been premised on the failure of previous democratic governments to initiate, foster and sustain development programs that could have brought about social and economic development. However, the military regimes that had ruled the Nigerian state for about 30 out of its 54 years as independent nation-state has also failed, on the most part, to establish the much expected social and economic development. Socio-economic development; in terms of improvement in the living standards of the citizenry, is perhaps the basic expectation and reward for the citizens in the social contract agreement between the governors and the governed. The spectre of underdevelopment has loomed large over most of sub-Sahara Africa and especially Nigeria since time immemorial. The cancerous consequences of underdevelopment assume deeply rooted sociological features that are manifested in a seemingly closed cycle of cause and effect relations. Of such features, corruption and insecurity are perhaps the two most salient and therefore arguably primary causes of underdevelopment in the country. Underdevelopment is itself a multi-faceted concept whose definition has courted both attention and controversy among scholars. The merriam-webster online dictionary takes a more macro-economic view by defining underdevelopment simply in terms of a state‟s low production capabilities and low standard of living, relative to other states Webster dictionary. However, the implications of the term are far less simplistic in academic and political literature. Euler-Chelpin (2011) acknowledges the difficulties in attempting to reduce underdevelopment to a single analyzable concept. He notes that in the aftermath of the second world war, economic growth was largely considered the yard-stick by which development/underdevelopment was determined, and this was indicated by a State’s gross national product (GNP).

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