I thoroughly enjoyed reading this trail-blazing text on the link between
two fundamental influences on socio-economic development of many a
country—urbanisation and crime—influences that are particularly
important in a developing country such as Nigeria. As a Nigerian national
myself, I have noted the frenetic pace of urbanisation in the country and
pondered the consequences of graduates and youths in different parts of
the country abandoning the rural and semi-rural towns for the cities, and
thus creating a squeeze of very large populations into such cities as Lagos,
Abuja, Enugu, Kano and Port Harcourt.
Such a squeeze seems to me a plausible cause of crimes in those cities,
given the lack of adequate economic opportunities to occupy the minds
of city dwellers. It is, therefore, apposite to have to write a foreword to a
text that, arguably for the first time, provides in fairly forensic details a
multi-lensed understanding of urbanisation and crime in Nigeria.