Nigeria’s recent economic difficulties are often explained through inflation, exchange-rate volatility, fiscal pressure, subsidy reform, debt exposure, and weak investment. These factors matter, but they do not fully explain why recovery remains socially fragile despite stabilisation efforts. This article argues that Nigeria’s recovery problem is also a problem of productive protection: the state’s uneven capacity to make economic life safely possible. It develops security-governance transmission as a framework for explaining how insecurity and weak institutional coordination convert localised violence, criminal predation, and infrastructure sabotage into wider economic stress. Using evidence from farms, pipelines, roads, and capital inflows, the article shows how insecurity travels through four arenas of Nigeria’s political economy: rural production, fiscal infrastructure, market mobility, and investment confidence. It identifies seven mechanisms: productive-space insecurity, critical infrastructure vulnerability, transaction-cost escalation, investor-risk perception, institutional coordination deficit, enforcement credibility deficit, and public-trust erosion. The article contributes to African political economy by showing that macroeconomic reform remains fragile where public authority cannot protect the productive base of economic life.

Keywords: productive protection, state capacity, economic reform, public authority, political economy, security-governance transmission.