By Favour Nnaubugwu

Corruption and unemployment aggravate violence in any society especially where the citizens are not part of the government says the World Bank.

Sarah Cliffe, Team Leader of 2011 World Development Report of the World Bank said  that any country that fails to take care of its citizenry by providing employment for the youths, in particular, would have violence to contend with.

Cliffe said, “Unemployment, corruption and exclusion increase the risks of violence and legitimate institutions and governance that give everyone a stake in national prosperity are the immune system that protects from different types of violence”

Many countries, she stated, face high unemployment, economic inequality or pressure from organized crime networks but do not repeatedly succumb to widespread violence but instead contain it.

The risk of major violence is greatest when high levels of stress  are combined with weak and illegitimate national institutions.  Societies are vulnerable when their institutions are unable to protect citizens from abuse, or to provide equitable access to justice and to economic opportunity. 

Vulnerabilities to violence, she elucidated, are exacerbated in countries with large youth populations, growing income inequality, and perceptible injustice.  Externally-driven events such as infiltration by foreign combatants, the presence of trafficking networks or economic shocks add to the stresses that can provoke violence.

“Poverty rates are 20 percentage points higher in countries affected by repeated cycles of violence over the last three decades,” noted the report released prior to the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and its sister agency, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), scheduled for the coming week.

The economic spillover effects for countries affected by conflict are enormous, as nations lose an estimated 0.7 percent of their annual gross domestic product (GDP) for each neighbor involved in civil wars. In the four weeks following the unrest in Libya, global oil prices surged by 15 percent”