Insecurity and Dying Cities in West Africa

Abstract

There are two crises usually discussed as if they belonged to separate literatures. One is functional: West African cities are growing faster than the governments running them can keep up, so water, housing, sanitation and basic security lag behind population. The other is violent Boko Haram and its offshoot ISWAP in Nigeria's northeast, bandit networks further west, and JNIM and the Islamic State Sahel Province across the Sahel, all of which have shifted in the last several years from rural insurgency toward pressuring cities directly, in Nigeria's case up to and including the federal capital. My argument here is that these are not two crises running in parallel. They feed each other. A city government with a working tax base and some channel for grievance is a harder target to besiege or recruit from; a city already losing that capacity is easier prey, and the violence that follows further wrecks the tax collection and service delivery that might have prevented it in the first place. Nigeria is the anchor case, and Bamako and the Burkinabe town of Djibo are used throughout as comparison points two different ways a Nigerian city under strain could still end up, one of them considerably worse than the other. The evidence comes from conflict-event datasets (ACLED, the Global Terrorism Index), UN and government reporting, and existing field-based studies published mostly between 2023 and early 2026. To be clear about what this paper is and isn't: it is a synthesis and a comparative framework, not a report of new fieldwork. The policy section at the end tries to say something about why each recommendation hasn't already happened, rather than just listing what should happen.