Institutional Mitigation Strategies in Quitting Banditry: Pathways, Options and Way Forward

Abstract

The challenges of insecurity are manifested in many ways ranging from kidnapping, banditry, cattle rustling, political thuggery and ethnoreligious conflicts amongst many others. Banditry leads to unwarranted perturbations in victims of insecurity and requires urgent formulations of long-lasting solutions. The focus of this paper was banditry and institutional mitigation strategies towards ending the menace. The paper adopts a secondary data generation method, relying on empirical literature to gather information for analysis, as such, a survey of available literature was undertaken and the review of same done. The content analysis technique is employed to derive themes, aggregate scholarly viewpoints, and subsequently analyze the data. The findings revealed that different social institutions have an active role in the sustainability of banditry and hold a mitigative role in curbing and eradicating banditry in the count, it was also discovered that the family institution serves as a recruiting ground for bandits and intending bandits, failure of the family institution in instilling value orientation is the major reason for the banditry. Instilling value orientation in the family institution will help curb banditry in the country. In addition, the economic institution being a superstructure of all institutions is the backbone for the sustainability of banditry, and imposing an economic sanction in areas ravaged by banditry will curb banditry and its notorious activities. The paper recommended that youthful cohorts should be informed of death warrant should any culprit be convicted, this will instil value orientation in the heads of the family institution to extend the value orientation to each family, and will help curb banditry activities and techniques adopted by the bandits for logistics supplies.