As President Muhammadu Buhari repeatedly claims that security has improved under his administration, a new poll shows that the majority of Nigerians feel less safe than they did five years ago.
The report, World Risk Poll, shows that 3 in five Nigerians, or 61%, feel less safe than they did five years ago. The report was authored by an independent global charity, Lloyds Register Foundation, working to engineer a safer world.
The organisation gathered data from 125,000 people in 121 countries in order to get a global picture of the risk landscape, examining peoples experiences and perceptions of commonly faced risks, from pandemics and climate change to work-related accidents and road traffic collisions.
According to the data collected in 2021 Nigeria is the country with the fourth highest proportion of people who report feeling less safe than five years ago, languishing behind only Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Venezuela. At 61%, this number has increased by a dramatic 26 percentage points since the last World Risk Poll in 2019, when 35% of Nigerians reported feeling less safe.
While the Covid-19 pandemic may have played a role, the reasons behind this increase are likely linked to the country experiencing a wave of crime and violence in 2021 that included terrorism and kidnappings, the report said. This is reflected in the poll results, with half (50%) of the 1,000 Nigerians polled saying they, or someone they know, have experienced serious harm from violent crime in the past two years. This is more than double the number in 2019 when this figure stood at 22%.
Other safety risks Nigerians feel very worried about include road or traffic accidents (59%), severe weather (49%), and the work they do (37%). Significantly, all areas of risk that Nigerians were polled about in 2019 saw an increase in responses of people feeling very worried in 2021.
Spread across four themed reports, the poll covers the biggest risks facing people and communities globally, ranging from road crashes, severe weather, climate change, and disaster resilience, to work-related harm, violence, harassment at work, and use of personal data.
The Foundation expressed its hope that the research will be repeated at least two more times, in 2023 and 2025.
