The relationship that exists between politics and religion cannot be over-emphasized in Nigeria polity since the evolution of a sustainable democracy which has heightened the relevance of religion in our society. Religion has been identified as one of the factors that have divided the people of Nigeria who are divided already by many phenomena that are of nature. The diversities engineered by cultures, customs, traditions and values are not as potent as religion in dividing the people, ensuing conflict, creating a paradise for favoritism, generating riot and insurgence. Religious leaders have become force to reckon with in the country, many of them become politicians out of the blues because of their influence on the mindset of their members to decide as regard electioneering activities. However, politics needs to be guided by religion ideally, evidently most policies fabricated, go in line with dogmas of either Christianity or Islam before other indexes may follow.  People are better divided by religion.   This paper focuses on examining the influence of religion on politics in Nigeria’s fourth republic using the Boko-haram insurgence as the major yardstick to establishing the impacts of religion on the divisive Nigeria.

While across known histories of societies the human societies had always developed within the confines of their limits of social justice, the security or otherwise of societies had always been directly proportional to their level of social justice. Invariably, this implies the higher the acceptance and recognition of the need for social justice by a society, the higher the society’s chances for national security. Social justice has thus proven to be a critical sine qua non for an egalitarian and a just society where equity, selflessness and equitable distribution of resources reign. However, the lack and deliberate emasculation of social justice within the society by the state and/or its machineries has over time, consequentially, informed a pathological situation; a situation where, due to the absence or deliberate neglect of the need for social justice in the accumulation of wealth, distribution of wealth and resources as well as social, economic and political relationships amongst the people, the rich are becoming richer whilst the less privileged are becoming more disadvantaged. The social implication and effect of this social pathology is the impulse by the rich or the privileged to see and use corruption to accumulate more wealth, resources and power in unjust social, economic and political exchanges in their bid to maintain the unjust socio-economic and political systems, whilst the poor and the less privileged tend to see and use corruption as a leveller and means to accumulating their own share of the societal wealth, resources and power. The corrupt environment created by social injustice is therefore antithetical to any country’s quest for national security. This is chiefly because national security objectives and corruption are two parallel lines that cannot and have never met. This article therefore argues that social justice backed by egalitarian and equitable distribution of wealth, resources and social services by the government would bring about a corrupt-free society where insecurity would be minimised and reduced to the barest minimum.   Keywords: Social injustice, corruption, insecurity, Nigeria’s National Security, Nigeria.

Although, Nigeria is chiefly known for its oil and gas production, agriculture employs about 70 per cent of its labour force. Nigeria has experienced severe farmers-herders conflict that has negatively influenced her agricultural production capacity, resulting in severe food insecurity. Tensions have grown over the past decades, with increasingly violent flare-ups between the farmers and the herdsmen spreading across the entire country. In recent times, many scholarly studies and inquiries on the impact of Information Communications Technology, particularly with respect to promoting food security in Nigeria, have been engendered mainly by the need to ensure greater agricultural outputs among farmers and other agriculturists. However, only scanty attention had been devoted to the need to understand the imperativeness of the use of Information Communications Technology in the quest to proffer solutions to the incessant farmers-herdsmen conflicts that have also contributed to the unpalatable state of food security in Nigeria. The study adopts Karl Marx’s Conflict Theory as a framework of analysis and qualitative date elicited through content analysis of desktop date. Hinging on this theory, this study contends that the farmers-herdsmen conflict is inevitable like every other conflict due to the competition for limited land resources. The study however found out that why the farmers-herdsmen conflict has persisted, among many other factors, was due to the failure of relevant stakeholders to leverage on the possibilities of Information Communications Technology to address the technological gap in the conflict. While further findings suggest that the principal causes and aggravating factors behind the escalating conflict are climatic changes; population growth; technological and economic changes; crime; political and ethnic strife; and cultural changes, the lack of use of Information Communications Technology in the areas of educating both the farmers and herders, awareness creation, crime reporting and conflicts resolution further compounds the farmers-herdsmen conflicts. This study recommends the need for proper and improved use of I.C.T. in the processes to address the farmers-herdsmen conflicts.

Traditional institutions held pre-eminence positions in the pre-colonial societies in Nigeria. The level of order witnessed during this period was a testimony to the invaluable roles played by the traditional rulers in administering their different empires, kingdoms and communities. However, during the colonial era, the position of traditional rulers was compromised as they became mere stooges of the colonial power. The post-colonial period saw the traditional rulers’ roles diminished as they were given advisory roles in previous constitutions and with no single role in the 1999 Constitution. Thus, for the continuous relevance of the traditional institutions, there is a need for re-examination of their roles in the country. This chapter argues for community based developmental roles for the traditional rulers in the country. These include promotion of tourism development, encouraging modern agricultural development, maintenance of peaceful co-existence among the people of their domain and settlers from other parts of the country, providing platform for alternative dispute resolution, monitoring the activities of the various vigilante groups and other unconventional security apparatus in their communities and lastly partnering the security operatives through intelligence gathering within their domains for effective operations of security outfits in serving the people better.

Urban centres continue to attract people across social divides. So also is the environment, which changes with constant interactions among urban population who constantly harness environmental resources for their survival. This process comes with its attendant effects that could be either positive or negative. This process explains the rationale behind uneven population patterns among human settlements as well as the lopsided distribution of resources needed to make life worthy of living. The public utilities, health and social services continue to be largely unavailable and where they are available, they are inefficient, shoddy and collapsing. This study is therefore a novel attempt at making a modest contribution to academic discourse on urban studies. It tries to explore the impact of urbanisation on health situation and life expectancy of urban dwellers. The study made use of primary data, which was collected through telephone interviews. The participants in these interviews included scholars in urban studies, public health educators, social workers, and epidemiologists. This was complemented with data from existing literature from scholars in urban and health studies. The results from this study showed that urban environmental problems like inadequate water and sanitation, high infant mortality, lack of rubbish disposal, industrial pollution and its attendant respiratory infections and other infectious and parasitic diseases persist. This is therefore an indication of the deleterious status of socio-economic determinants of health that can hamper a healthy life expectancy.