Arts and Social Sciences Journal

Youth Crises and Conventional Policing in Nigeria: A Political Economy Analysis

Abstract

Tedheke Moses EU

Most studies in social issues in this age of hyper-imperialism which is globalization or neo-liberalism see such phenomena from the point of view of eclecticism. In other words, they see issues one-sidedly neglecting their interconnections and their concatenations which dialectics always bring out in very clear focus. The same is very true of youth crisis resulting from youth bulge locally and internationally. In such partial focus on issues, clues to crises generating dynamics are papered over which have been the case of youth crises in Nigeria, Africa, the Third World and beyond. As a result of the lack of fundamentals in the analysis of youth crises or bulge the task of conventional policing becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible. Youth bulge is a product of global underdevelopment. It is the product of collaboration between the local agents of neo-liberalism (in this case Nigerian rentier or comprador bourgeoisie) and their international mentors, the advanced capitalist bourgeoisie of Europe, North America and Japan. It is a product of relative over population, relative to means of employment generated by the system, and not to the means of subsistence. The youth crises is equally a product of an abnormal state that has deviated from the dynamics of classical state formation based on the internal emergence of a dominant class but which structures in Nigeria have been attenuated by the external imposition of the state strengthening its abnormalities. It has created vampire-victim relations making Nigeria, Africa and indeed the Third World the victim of imperialism or the vampire. This study has found out that superfluous population is a creation of the type of a global political economy which has resulted in youth bulges here and there. It is a product of global criminal political economy of neo-liberalism. This economy of globalization has removed the state world-wide from social provisioning hindering the welfare state. In this process, the unemployed becomes criminalized making the task of conventional policing increasingly difficult.