State collapse is the complete failure of governance and government capacity and authority within the territory of a sovereign state. Examples of collapsed states are Somalia or the final decade of Yugoslavia.
Robert I. Rotberg in a paper titled Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators, noted that a collapsed state is a rare and extreme version of a failed state. According to him, in a collapsed state, political goods are obtained through private or ad hoc means. Security is equated with the rule of the strong. A collapsed state exhibits a vacuum of authority. It is a mere geographical expression with no formal control or authority exerted by recognized state apparatus!
In a collapsed state, every town, every village and every individual is more or less on his own. No law, no order, no judiciary and no government services. That extreme state of collapse flows as the utter failure of all regulatory and government systems.
It is observed that when Somalia failed in the late 1980s, it soon collapsed. Bosnia, Lebanon, and Afghanistan collapsed more than a decade ago, and Sierra Leone collapsed in the 1990s. When those collapses occurred, Robert Rotberg states that substate actors took over, as they always do when the prime polity disappears. Those warlords or substate actors gained control over regions and subregions within what had been a nation-state, built up their own local security apparatuses and mechanisms, sanctioned markets and other trading arrangements, and even established an attenuated form of international relations.
Incidentally Robert I. Rotberg cited above, who is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy Schools Programme On Intrastate Conflict and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell recently wrote a thought provoking article titled, Nigeria Is a Failed State and published by foreignpolicy.com.
The duo started the article by asserting that the first step  to restoring stability and security in Nigeria is recognizing that the government has lost control. And they went ahead to give reasons why they think that Nigeria is already a failed state. They argued that Nigeria has long teetered on the precipice of failure, but now, unable to keep its citizens safe and secure, Nigeria has become a fully failed state of critical geopolitical concern.
They rightly observed that Nigerias security challenges are already destabilising the West African region in the face of resurgent jihadism, making the battles of the Sahel that much more difficult to contain. And they warned that spillover from Nigerias failures ultimately affect the security of Europe and the United States.
These two foreign policy experts averred that they did not come into this decision lightly, insisting that their designation of Nigeria as a failed state was informed by a body of political theory developed at the turn of this century and elaborated upon, case by case, ever since. According to the duo, there are four kinds of nations: the strong, the weak, the failed, and the collapsed.
Citing previously published research, they said, of the 193 members of the United Nations, 60 or 70 are strong. There are three places that should be considered collapsed: Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen.
The duo wrote, Eighty or 90 U.N. members are weak. Weakness consists of providing many, but not all, of essential public goods, the most important of which are security and safety. If citizens are not secure  from harm within national borders, governments cannot deliver good governance (the essential services that citizens expect) to their constituents. Possibly a dozen or so states are failed, including the  Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, and Myanmar. Such failed states lack security, are unsafe, have weak rules of law, are corrupt, they limit political participation and voice,  discriminate within its borders against various classes and kinds of citizens, and provide educational and medical services sparingly.
They argued that most failed states are violent. All failed states harbor some form of violent internal strife, such as civil war or insurgency. They noted that Nigeria now confronts six or more internal insurrections and the inability of the Nigerian state to provide peace and stability to its people has tipped a hitherto very weak state into failure.
At a bare minimum, citizens expect their states to keep them secure from external attack and to keep them safe within their borders. The bargain that subjects long ago made with their sovereigns was being kept from harm in exchange for allegiance and taxation. When that quid pro quo breaks down, a state loses its coherence, its social fabric disintegrates, and warring factions subvert the social contract that should provide the fundamental foundation of the state. Nigeria now appears to have reached the point of no return, the duo asserted.
They noted that indeed, few parts of Nigeria are today fully safe.
Having seen from the aforementioned scholars application of political theory and observation that Nigeria is already a failed state, how can we prevent the country from becoming a collapsed state?
Good enough Rotberg did recognise that none of the designations (the strong, the weak, the failed, and the collapsed state) is terminal. He noted that Lebanon, and Tajikistan recovered from collapse and are now weak. Afghanistan and Sierra Leone graduated from collapsed to failed. Zimbabwe is moving rapidly from being strong toward failure. The quality of failed or collapsed is real, but need not be static. Failure is a fluid halting place, with movement forward to weakness and backward into collapse always possible. Certainly failure and collapse are neither inevitable nor unavoidable.
Whereas weak states fail much more easily than strong ones, failure is not preordained. Failure is preventable, particularly since human agency rather than structural flaws or institutional insufficiencies are almost invariably at the root of slides from weakness (or strength) toward failure and collapse. Since we now know that a collapsed state is a state that has been rendered ineffective and is not able to enforce its laws uniformly or provide basic goods and services to its citizens because  of (variously) high crime rates, insurgency, extreme political corruption, an impenetrable and ineffective bureaucracy, among others, we can prevent Nigeria from collapsing by sincerely tackling insurgency, high crime rates, ineffective bureaucracy and corruption.
Like many have said this is also time for the federal government to shed its weight and devolve power to the states and local governments. After all, it is at the states and local governments and wards that
most citizens live and obtain services. The federal government should recognize that it does not have the personnel or reach as much as states and local governments, as such, it should willingly cede power and authority to those levels that are closer to the people. That way, collapse can be averted.
Aluta Continua!