FRAGILE STATE AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY: THE PLACE OF NIGERIA: 2006 – 2017

Usman Sambo

Usman Sambo Federal University Gashua, Yobe State

Keywords: Failed State. Fragile State, Fund for peace, Accountability, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper examines fragile state as its relate to public accountability and control a review of Nigeria fron2006 to 2017. The purpose is to relate Nigeria to fail state and assess whether Nigeria deserves the ranking usually done by FSI. This study uses qualitative research design to gain insight into the Nigerian public service as it relates to social, economic and political factors in determining its failed state status and accountability. The study also employs quantitative instrument of correlation to measure the strength of relationship between failed state index and accountability. The study makes use of the failed state index (FSI) from the Fund for Peace and the corruption perception index (CPI) from the Transparency International which serves as our proxy for accountability. The ranking of a failed state is based on the total scores of 12 indicators. Each indicator is placed on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being most and 10 being the most unstable. The total score of all the indicators gives the index for that country. The CPI ranks states by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. It is an index which is based on certain criteria which include bribery of public servants, embezzlement of public funds, cuts in public procurement and the effectiveness of the public sector's anticorruption effort. It uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 clean. The FSI and CPI of Nigeria from 2006 to 2017 is presented below. It was found out that denial of successive regimes to tackle some obvious national issues such as the continuous decay of infrastructural facilities, poor assessment indices by both the United States National Intelligence Council and the World Bank, the issue of National Security such as political assassination and the Niger Delta crisis, the collapse of the judiciary that is the last hope of the common man, the collapse of the bureaucratic and political institutions are serious indicators of Nigeria being a fragile state. Also that these failures in the delivery of public services can be attributed largely to the high level of corruption and lack of accountability and transparency in the delivery of public services in spite of the various institutions established to check corrupt practices in Nigeria. It was however recommended that Nigeria has to strengthen its democratic institutions, fight corruption, improve infrastructure and curtail insecurity to reclaim its power to avoid falling in the categories of fragile state.

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