Nigeria Watch: Eighth Report on Violence in Nigeria

This Eighth Annual Report on lethal violence in Nigeria covers the period between 1 January and 31 December 2018.

The study has been conducted by Vitus Nwankwo Ukoji with the help of Abiola Victoria Ayodokun and Victor Chinedu Eze at the University of Ibadan.

The publication of this report is a good opportunity to remind readers that the Nigeria Watch dataset is the most documented tracking service on lethal violence in Nigeria. The methodology and sources are online. They have been discussed in various books and occasions, especially during an international conference organized by IFRA at the University of Ibadan in October 2016. The data are updated on a daily basis by a team of Nigerian researchers, they come from a wide variety of local sources and they are not limited by thresholds that would eliminate cases with lower levels of mortality.

The analysis confirms trends about the prevalence of crime and political conflicts, with a slight increase in the number of violent deaths reported in 2018. Despite some improvement, roads also remained the
killing fields of Nigeria, a fact that does not fit well into common narratives about the impact of terrorism or an alleged clash of civilization between the North and the South of the most populous country in Africa. Actually, car accidents do not only affect victims of all religions, ethnic groups and social classes. They also have an economic cost: the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) estimates that Nigeria loses over 3% of its Gross domestic product (GDP) to road crashes annually.