In the checklist of Nigeria’s security challenges, the Boko Haram insurgency stands out as the most disturbing and unsettling experience. Founded in 2002 by Mohammed Yusuf, an Orthodox Islamist proselyte, the Boko Haram sect has waged a relentless war of attrition against the Nigerian State. The group deployed improvised explosive devices, guerrilla warfare, suicide bombings, hostage taking, rape, and other heinous atrocities to undermine Nigeria’s sovereignty and national security. As a corollary to this pursuit, the paper is poised to unravel and expose the underlying factors through the context of the theory of post colonial state. The overriding tendency to cease and manipulate the state apparatus by the dominant power elite structurally disarticulates and weakens the state on the one hand and sustains the Boko Haram vicious campaigns of terror on the other hand. The paper therefore recommends a total reappraisal of the nature and character of the Nigerian state on the basis of entrenching a veritable democratic culture and de-emphasizing the frantic quest for political power by competing factions of the ruling class.
Keywords: Boko Haram, Insurgency, Security, State, ruling class and sovereignty.
