9 - Informalization & its discontents The informal economy & Islamic radicalization in northern Nigeria

Summary

Introduction

The economic factors underlying violent radicalization are often less clear cut than political and religious factors. High levels of poverty, unemployment and illiteracy in northern Nigeria have been contrasted with lower levels of deprivation in southern Nigeria, particularly in the South West of the country. However, very few poor northern Nigerian Muslims have succumbed to radicalization, and not all Islamic radicals are poor, raising questions about why some poor northern Muslims become radicalized while others do not, and what other factors intervene in the process of radicalization. This study moves away from a general poverty perspective on drivers of radicalization to focus more explicitly on how dynamics of economic informality have shaped and sometimes mitigated radicalization processes, often in unexpected ways.

In northern Nigeria, a particularly negative convergence of high rates of population growth, low levels of educational attainment and a collapse of formal economic opportunities in the wake of market reforms have devastated the local economy. In the Nigerian context where few can afford open unemployment, the stresses of poverty and joblessness are largely played out in the informal economy. In Nigeria's large informal economy, which accounts for 80 per cent of the non-agricultural employment, poverty and disaffection interact with ethnically and religiously based forms of economic organization, creating tensions and opportunities that cast important light on the trajectories of Islamic radicalization (ILO 2018; Meagher 2009, 2013). An informal-economy-centred analysis offers a more complex understanding of how poverty and unemployment interact with issues of competition, disaffection, religious networks and experiences of the state. Instead of focusing on the failure of the formal economy to provide jobs, this study will concentrate on the radicalizing and counter-radicalizing implications of structures and networks within the informal economy, which shapes how the overwhelming majority of northern Nigeria's formally unemployed actually live, work and experience the state.

This chapter will explore whether, in absorbing the unemployed and disaffected, the informal economy serves as an incubator of radicalization or as a buffer against it. Attention will focus on how high unemployment has interacted with shifting patterns of educational attainment, political claims, and new religious movements to restructure channels of economic opportunity and political expression among the informally employed.