Does Inequality or Poverty Explain Attacks in Nigeria?

By William Seitz

Nigeria’s poor have recently made headlines since the contents of a troubling report on the country’s economic development were made public. Despite the country’s  years of strong GDP growth, Nigeria’s national statistics bureau estimates that 2010 saw a sharp increase in the number of Nigerians who considered themselves poor (about 94% of survey respondents [PDF]). The percentage of Nigerians living on a dollar-a-day or less also grew to more than 60% in 2010, 10% higher than the last study six years before.

Violent attacks by Boko Haram and other militant groups are also in the news, and it did not take long for observers to claim a causal relationship. Former US President Bill Clinton drew such a conclusion several days ago, saying that: “You can’t just have this level of inequality persist. That’s what’s fueling all this stuff”.

The ‘inequality-causes-violence’ explanation of separatist movements and terrorist attacks is certainly intuitively appealing. The Northern and Northeastern regions of Nigeria are both the poorest by many measures and home to several militant groups. Nigeria’s wealth is very unequally distributed. By almost every welfare or income indicator, Nigeria is poorer, more unequal, and more violent than Europe, North America and many parts of Africa, Asia and South America.

There is some academic work backing the theory that poverty or inequality leads to more effective organized violence. Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor for example used data from attacks against Israeli targets (PDF) to suggest that: “Poor economic conditions may lead more able, better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact, terror missions” (1).

But, although the poverty and inequality explanation for violence might be partially correct, it helps to be specific about what we mean.

Civil war, insurgency and terrorist attacks continued for more than 25 years in Sri Lanka only coming to a bloody end three years ago, even though per capita GDP is nearly three times higher there than peaceful Tanzania, or almost twice as high as in Ghana, another comparatively calm African country. As President, Clinton personally dealt with some of the consequences of violence in Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Spain to list a few examples, this despite the fact that Irish, Yugoslavian and Spanish people were substantially wealthier than the global average at the time. Peaceful Botswana’s income equality compares poorly to Nigeria’s, as do several more peaceful Latin American countries including Argentina and Belize.

These anecdotes prove nothing, but show that there are probably other conditions and factors which can lead to (or restrain) violent outcomes. Terrorism and other forms of violence do not generally correlate well with poverty and income equality indicators, and it would be a mistake to assume that individual violent acts could be understood casually.

Identifying the direction of causality is another problem: is poverty a cause or a symptom? Poor people do engage in violence, and inequality is sometimes high in violent countries, but the alternative explanation that violence “leaves people poorer” also seems to fit with these generalizations.  It is not very hard to imagine a situation where violent attacks — like blowing up cars in crowded markets or reducing a city to ruble – leave most people with less wealth, even if some poor people resort to violence to become less poor or because they are angry about poverty.

For an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2003 (2), Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Male?ková found that individuals who participate in terrorist attacks are often wealthier, and better educated than the general population (PDF). As another anecdote, the Nigerian “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who was sentenced to life in prison just days ago is quite a bizarre terrorist according to the poverty explanation: he is a relatively well-educated young man, and his father is one of the wealthiest people in Africa.

In a 2009 NBER working paper (PDF), Eli Berman, Jacob N. Shapiro and Joseph Felter used data on violence in the Philippines and Iraq to show that unemployment is at times negatively correlated with violent attacks (3). That is to say that as unemployment increases there are fewer attacks under the circumstances they describe. The authors interpret this finding as an indication that the cost of information for counterinsurgency efforts is a crucial factor in violent situations.

These points would all seem to suggest that while poverty, unemployment, or inequality might be related to violence in Nigeria, it is not clear that those are the best or only explanations for recent events.

(1) Efraim Benmelech, C. B. (2009). Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism. NBER Working Paper .

(2)  Alan B. Krueger, J. M. (2003). Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is there a Causal Connection? Journal of Economic Perspectives , 119 –144.

(3)  Eli Berman, J. N. (2009). Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Iraq and the Philippines. NBER Working Papers .