The Political Economy of Hunger and Insecurity in Nigeria: A Marxist Approach

Nigeria in 2026 confronts a compounding crisis of hunger and insecurity that together threaten the fundamental legitimacy and cohesion of the state. Nearly thirty-five million Nigerians are projected to face acute food insecurity during the 2026 lean season, the worst hunger figures recorded in a decade, while a parallel and interlinked security crisis, most visibly expressed in the proliferation of kidnapping, banditry, and hostage-taking for ransom, has entrenched itself as a self-sustaining criminal economy generating billions of naira annually. This paper interrogates the relationship between hunger and insecurity in Nigeria through the lens of Marxist theory, propounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the exploratory research design using secondary sources of data to demonstrates how the Nigerian state functions as an instrument that reproduces the interests of a dominant class while criminalising and repressing the dispossessed, whose alienation from land and livelihood expresses itself in banditry, herder-farmer violence, and the ransom economy. The findings uncover that hunger and insecurity in Nigeria cannot be resolved through security spending or charity-based interventions alone, but require a fundamental restructuring of the relations of production, equitable redistribution of land and resources, and a democratization of the state's accumulation process. The paper concludes that hunger and insecurity are structurally produced outcomes of Nigeria's peripheral, extractive, and class-stratified capitalist formation, a formation inherited from colonial rule and reproduced by a rentier post-colonial state that has failed to develop the forces of production or resolve the contradictions between an impoverished, dispossessed majority and a narrow, accumulating ruling class. Thus recommends the implementation of a radical land and agrarian reform programs that empowers smallholder and peasant producers, the redirection of public expenditure from militarized security responses toward productive investment in agriculture and rural infrastructure, and the institution of transparent, accountable, and inclusive governance structures capable of breaking the cycle of elite capture that sustains both hunger and insecurity.