Diversion of Scarce Foreign Exchange for Military Uses Including Running of Domestic Arms Production Industries or Facilities

The militarized tenets of Nigerian state and the tendency for government to increase defense spending as an opportunity for ensuring national security, this paper examines the diversion of scarce foreign exchange for military uses in running domestic arms production industries for national development. As Nigeria intends building a strong defence, the findings in the paper revealed that lack of transparency in particular creates high vulnerability for corruption, especially in arms procurement processes. In many countries, the military tends to be one of the most corrupt sectors of government, and arms procurement domestic and international is especially subject to corruption, in both developed and developing countries and Nigeria is no exception. Despite scare foreign exchange in recent time, defense spending has increased annually; the level of insecurity in Nigeria has worsened. This is because the funds budgeted for national security is usually non-utilized for the purpose of national security. So long as the defense expenditure increases at the detriment various overhead sectors of the Nigerian economy, the insecurity syndrome in Nigeria would persist. This paper therefore recommends that Nigerian government must be true to its people-focused security agenda, seek to implement this agenda in a collective way, involving the public, the media and those other units of the society that have the capacity to provide relevant information for the achievement of national security goals. While the present administration demonstrated a strong will to combat financial corruption, effort must be put on ground to ensure that the crusade is non-selective either on the basis of ethnic, political, sectional or religious in the military and other sectors