Abstract
Fifty years after independence, the discourse and practice of security/national security in Nigeria needs re-examination. Security is a contested terrain amongst nation at different stages of development. At the moment, the contest is over the referent-state or people. Have Nigerians ever face national security threat of the scale in countries of the North that threatened the existence of the state in the last fifty years? Have not we faced national security threats of the scale not peculiar with countries of the North that has continuously threatened the existence of the state in the last fifty years? More Nigerians are threatened by government policies than by neighbouring armies. What were the objectives, priorities and methods of national security in discourse and practice? Have we not been discussing and practicing security and national security wrongly thus endangering the very basis of security-the people? What do we mean when we talk about security and national security? Or when we make policies to protect and advance national security? This paper surveys the discourse and practice of national security in Nigeria using papers presented at the Historical Society of Nigeria congress on “Historicizing National Security, Order and Rule of Law”.It examined the understanding of national security arguing that the ambiguity evident in the term sanctioned and legitimised similar disposition in its use by policy makers. It called for the people of Nigeria to be the referent object of security rather than the interest of the elite subsumed for the state. Key words: Security, national security, state, human beings, scholars.
Highlights
Nigeria celebrated fifty years of self governance and if Nigeria is to last another fifty years, there is the need to review the national understanding of security and national security
Nor did ‘politics, the state and national security in Nigeria’ do a better job of fleshing the national security dilemma. It began by defining politics, state and security and connecting the first two with the latter in arriving at the “process, functions and public expectations of government in Nigeria” (HSN, 2008)
That question“historical context of a statist conception of national security bereft of ecological and socio-economic considerations...” producing conflict. It considered this as “narrow statist cum military perspective to the security question and demonstrates how the persistence of oil based conflicts contradicts this model” (HSN, 2008). It is this state centric security (Buzan, 1991) that benefits the Nigerian environment oppressively shaped by the military’spre-eminence in governance that needs to be reviewed in discourses by intellectual in support of the human security model (Booth, 2007)
Summary
This paper surveys the discourse and practice of national security in Nigeria using papers presented at the Historical Society of Nigeria congress on “Historicizing National Security, Order and Rule of Law”.It examined the understanding of national security arguing that the ambiguity evident in the term sanctioned and legitimised similar disposition in its use by policy makers. It called for the people of Nigeria to be the referent object of security rather than the interest of the elite subsumed for the state
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