Abstract
This study verified the link between insecurity and food access in Nigeria using time series data from 1996 to 2023, and how the Nigerian experience can be of relevance to the South African economy. The study is an ex post facto research that adopted the autoregressive distributed lag model approach to test the Consumer Price Index for food (as a proxy for food access) against explanatory variables such as political stability and the absence of violence or terrorism index, government effectiveness index, Corruption Perceptions Index (as measures of insecurity) while annual population figures were considered an additional explanatory variable because they indicate increasing demand for food. The study found that the increasing incidence of food inaccessibility in Nigeria are significantly attributable to rising insecurity. Therefore, all levels of government must collaborate to tackle insecurity, population growth must be managed, and government institutions should be strengthened to improve effectiveness.