Femi Phillips
Nigeria is facing unprecedented security challenges, and this is pushing the nation to the brink and threatening to tear it apart. Though the threat posed by the Boko Haram insurgency is the core security challenge faced by Nigeria, the Fulani herdsmen and farmers’ clashes, spate of kidnappings and killings of innocent people by bandits have intensified the security crisis. Can anyone boast of their safety in Nigeria today? Barely is there any part of the country where people’s safety is guaranteed, and this is having a significant impact on Nigeria’s national security, social cohesion and economic development. Increasingly, high-profile people are becoming central targets for kidnappers due to ransom payment calculations. It is even more disturbing when security agencies are petrified to travel by road in some parts of Nigeria without adequate reinforcements. Arguably then, the only persons who are safe in Nigeria are the President and the Vice President.
Nigeria has become a central point not only in global terrorism but also in the overall view of people’s safety. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace’s 2018 Global Terrorism Index, Nigeria ranks third out of a tally of 163 “most terrorised countries.” On its part, the World Economic Forum’s Global Institute of Peace publication on January 23, 2019, ranked Nigeria 124 out of 128 in the world’s safest countries based on three factors: war and peace, personal security and natural disaster. The result of these surveys given the current security dilemma in Nigeria is incontrovertible. As of June 18, 2019, the United Kingdom and the United States of America travel advisories openly cautioned their citizens not to travel to about 22 out of the 36 states in Nigeria based on insecurity.
How did Nigeria get to this point? The answer is simple. Successive governments and political office holders do not seem to grasp the human security concept and how critical it is in boosting national security. Those who govern Nigeria at the local, state and national levels have neglected critical aspects of human security in the country’s governance and security architecture. Whether this is deliberate as suggested by conspiracy theorists who claim it is a ploy to keep the populace subjugated and make them susceptible to political manipulations, or whether it is inadvertent, the consequences of such strategies are certainly backfiring. Lack of understanding or deliberate neglect of critical aspects of human security in the 21st century – for whatever reasons – is a recipe for insecurity, conflict and instability.
What is human security? According to the United Nations Development Programme, human security is defined as “safety from such chronic threats such as hunger, disease and repression. It means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life — whether in homes, in jobs or communities.”
Notably, this definition highlights a conceptual divergence of the security object from state-centrism to the human who occupies the territory. It is a significant shift in the discourse of what the referent object of security should be. The human-centric security approach adopts the view that once the people are secured, the territory will enjoy relative peace and stability. In the human security assumption, a country will be mostly safe when its people have good living conditions, adequate housing, good education and access to good health care, at the fundamental level.
Empirically, it is countries that have adopted the human security concept that enjoy relative peace – as seen in Western Europe and few others around the world. Nigeria on its part has tended to maintain a seemingly inflexible view of the state as the referent object of security while paying less attention to the people who live in it. This Nigeria disposition to security is somewhat reflected in the famous 2002 debate on the subject in which Bellamy and McDonald, in replying to arguments advanced by Thomas and Tow on the utility of human security, observed “that some states are unable to provide security for their citizens, and that despite huge security allocation for security, many states contribute to individual insecurity”.
Over the years then, instead of ensuring that Nigerian citizens have access to education, healthcare, housing and jobs, the country spends more on defence (arms and ammunition) in the name of national security. Some security experts, political advisers and public commentators are also caught up in this thinking. They pay attention to procurements of arms and ammunition, funding for the military, police and security agencies when discussing security matters. While this realist state-centric disposition to security is not particularly faulty, it is however no longer adequate in 21st-century security thinking. Having a strong army and police to protect Nigerian borders is vital, but it is not enough because threats to national security are increasingly internal and not external. The primary threat posed to Nigeria’s national security is by its citizens – and we can explore this point on another opportunity.
I have always maintained that providing basic human security needs will guarantee national security. Today, Nigeria is being terrorised by citizens whom it had neglected. There is no incentive for citizens to promote nationalism or defend their country, so it is not unusual for them to welcome or join outsiders to perpetrate crimes and promote mayhem against their own country. In countries where basic human security needs have been met, the citizens themselves perform an aspect of indirect policing in the form of communicative advantage.
In this context, the citizens themselves notify the security agencies about potential local or transnational crime perpetrators who could disrupt their patterns of daily life. In Western Europe, most citizens will call the police if they suspect the virulent movements of people and activities. Often, they vastly contribute to intelligence gathering because there is an incentive to do so – they enjoy underlying human security. Suffice it to say however that notwithstanding such situations, even Western European countries do not have perfect security situations, and no country will have perfect security due to contentions inherent in human nature. But then, it has made a commendable head-start.
Primarily, the Nigerian government must understand that human security is the most critical aspect of national security. Its national security architecture should securitise basic human security needs, i.e. food, health, housing and education as obtainable in peaceful and stable countries such as the UK and the USA that we tend to emulate. For instance, in these two neo-liberal countries, education is free up to the secondary school level. They know that keeping their children off the streets and making education up to secondary school compulsory are a national security issue. Education up to secondary school level in Malaysia is compulsory and free. Education is free and compulsory from the age of six to15 in Japan. While examinations or tuition fees for public schools are free in these examples, parents only contribute to things like school trips, lunch fees and uniforms. Nigeria tends to be more neo-liberal than the people who developed the ideology. When the founders of neo-liberalism give free education up to secondary school level to their citizens, Nigeria is privatising its entire education structures. Both local and international development experts will even argue that education should be market-led – this is also another debate to be explored. Besides education, citizens of the countries mentioned here are primarily secured when it comes to food, shelter and healthcare; hence, the relative peace and security which they enjoy.
- Philips is an international relations and security expert based in Stoke on Trent, UK
[Punch]
