Economic Reform Poverty and Internal Security in Nigeria

Economic reforms policies and programmes are internationally designed approaches by the World Bank and I.M.F with the overt aim of reorganizing and repositioning the economies of the underdeveloped countries and the Third Word toward re-servicing their economies by creating employment and reducing poverty, Nigeria inclusive. Using a combination of primary and secondary method of data collection and analysis, the study distilled that these programmes and policies SAP, deregulation, liberilisation e.t.c instead elevate the level of poverty, unemployment, inequality, providing the context for youths idleness and attendant implication on national security. Equally, the researcher uses the underdevelopment theory as the main theoretical base of the study to assess the nexus between economic reform, poverty and national security in Nigeria. This enables the study to further confirm that, failure of previous attempts at poverty alleviation and economic reform policies largely contributed towards hiking the tempo of poverty, thereby rendering the poor vulnerable as easy fray for indoctrination into terrorist enclave which affected national security in Nigeria.