Nigeria in few months’ time will be marking 66 years of her independence and can best be described as pathology of conflict in leadership which has become so endemic that, by its consequences, it has brought the process of socio-economic development to a virtual standstill. What little concrete progress that was then recorded since independence has become nullified by the human and financial costs exacted by new social catastrophes such as political instability and poor leadership.
The immediate contributing factors to the upsurge of conflicts can be related to the persistence of mass poverty, environmental pressures and damage, internal socio-ethnic inequalities and political domination as well as a pattern of dictatorial governance. These conditions tend to generate inter-group hostility, individual and group insecurity, open conflict and recurrent instability.
The current Nigeria democratic environment has not helped matters, for example, inter-ethnic and religious hostility and confrontation have paradoxically assumed a direct, open and fiercer dimension than in the long years of military dictatorship. These factors, it is contended constituted the core security challenge at least throughout the first 60 years of Nigeria independence to the extent that the execution of real development for the people is obstructed as a consequence. If care is not taking, the absence of a substantive transformation of the Nigerian economy may compound the security outlook for the country during the next 50 years.
In the last 60 years, the nexus between environmental damage due to drought as well as the reckless pattern of mineral resources exploitation, such as crude oil in the Niger Delta, and insecurity policy presents yet another focus of concern in the post jubilee Nigeria. Increasingly in the Niger Delta, local owners of mineral oil resources are militantly agitating for resource control because, ironically, they suffer both environmental degradation and poverty while those in control of the state and the MNCs reap huge earnings from this enterprise in their territories.
The pathology of current Nigerian development crisis certainly has historical roots beyond the immediate currents cited above. They signify, in their essence, a long transition from the cataclysms, upheavals and dislocations created at various stages of Nigerian modern history by the trans- Atlantic slave trade, western colonial rule, neocolonial interventions during the Cold War era, and much lately, misrule by post-colonial political leaders which seems to perpetuate the underdevelopment of the Nigerian economy. With this structural root, Nigerian security environment will likely remain characterized by conflict and disorder well into this new era.
SECURITY AND DEVELOPMENT
Security attracts development and both security and development attract and stimulate foreign investments. In the other hand Security and Foreign Investments (globalization) lead to National Development if properly harnessed and utilized.
These concepts; Security and Development are rather what Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi calls a “basket of ideas” as seen in the international systems- and all have linkages that aim at expanding economic opportunities for a nation like Nigeria and promoting its global competitiveness. Government and business (foreign investment) will forge a partnership with the people to bring real, lasting social progress, a clean environment and economic opportunity to attract development to a nation.
Security is a multifaceted one that covers every share of human endeavours. According to Yomi Akinyeye, it could be “social security, economic security, psychological security, job security, and among others”. However, in the context of international relations, security is often associated with the activities of the state or nation-state. Security will therefore be used in this work in relation to the state.
Even though security does not have a universally accepted definition as various scholars have defined it in various ways depending on their intellectual predilection and/or ideological orientation. For example, Damus looks at security from the socio-economic perspective and defines security as “the prevention of property damage, casualty and death in the event of war”. Handreder and Buel, on their own case, see security as “the protection of a nation against all types of external aggression, espionage, hostile reconnaissance, sabotage, subversion, annoyance and other inimical influences”.
The definitions above are too narrow for this context. The first one sees security as having to do with war alone. Whereas, there are non-military threats such as famine, ecological disasters and even destruction of a nation’s resources (without recourse to arms) which are no less devastating than military threats. The second definition restricts itself to external threat mostly. We know, however, that threats to a nation can and do come from within the nation itself.
Robert McNamara got the essence of great difficulty in harnessing its human and material resources towards meaningful development and the promotion of the general well-being of the people. Security is of great concern to all human societies. This is because security impinges on the survival of every human being or society. Similarly, without security, the state is bound to experience great difficulty in harnessing its human and material resources towards meaningful development and the promotion of the general well-being of the people.
Some experts especially the Realist School of thought (Hens Morgenthau, R. Niebuhr and Herbert Butterfield) view security in narrow military terms and concentrated on the various forms of military response in the management of threats to security. To them, security implies the build-up of a formidable military defense to protect the territorial integrity of the state from both internal and external violations. To them, a state is secure to the extent to which it is able to build up its capability to deter potential aggressors, or defeat the latter should deterrence fail.
According to T. A. Imobighe, with the end of the cold war and the collapse of Soviet Union, the militaristic conception of security has come under increasing questioning. Apparently due to the global concern about resources degradation and environmental pollution amidst increasing consciousness of the unstable nature of the world economy, some Neo-Realist Scholars (R. Bernett, Richard Ulman, Barry Buzan and Jessica Mathews) have expanded the definition of security to include economic and ecological issues. To this group of Scholars, security means protection not only from military threats and natural disasters.
With recent developments, there has also developed a “new thinking” which has benefitted from the increasing awareness of the non-military of the vulnerabilities of African and other Third World countries. This new thinking, which has flourished, especially among African and third world scholars, conceives of security in still broader terms, to include the whole gamut of human needs. Security, in this broad sense, connotes freedom from, or elimination of, threat not only to the physical existence of the state, but also to its ability for self-protection and development, and the enhancement of the general well-being of all the people. It is this broad conceptualization of security that reflects the African condition.
In this sense, when we talk about national security, we should be understood as saying that apart from the physical survival of territorial states; security must have a positive impact on the conditions of life of the individuals within these states and provide all the inhabitants with the right atmosphere for their self- improvement and actualization. In other words, security should reflect what Imobighe refers as “human security” in which priority is given to the satisfaction of human needs in the utilization of Nigerian resources. This means, instead of pursuing excessive military aggrandizement in line with the realist conception of security, our emphasis should be to raise the general contentment of all human inhabitants.
Because the main focus has been regime security, much of Nigerian security efforts have been dissipated on over-concentration on the coercive apparatus of state and military build-up for which Nigeria has neither the resources nor the technological capacity to sustain. Obviously, because the concept of “human security” is yet to germinate in the security needs of the people this should form the bedrock of national security. Thus, rather than tailor Nigerian security efforts towards promoting human understanding and the satisfaction of basic needs within the nation, Nigeria’s security planners have taken to competitive arms build-up, thereby creating an atmosphere for the flourishing of mutual suspicion and antagonism within and between Nigerian states.
Also, we have to see security from the angles of Peace-Keeping, Peace-Enforcement and Post-Conflict Peace-Building. Peace-Keeping is a UN Intervention Squad in conflict situation. The whole scenario portrays a reflection of the needs of the international system at large and particularly of the African states system in which conflicts have become endemic, and of the fact that the expected role of the UN is increasingly being seen to be one of maintaining peace and security. The technology that is put to use for Peace- Keeping forces is increasing as more countries contribute troops to these forces, so also has the need to diversify the composition of the forces become imperative. All these changes, however, are in response to the equally changing nature and intensity of the conflicts that have to be resolved.
The expended functions of Peace-Keeping forces in recent times include election observation and organization, humanitarian assistance and security safe conditions for its delivery, observation and separation of combatants along demarcated boundaries, disarming of military and Para-military forces, promotion and protection of human rights, mine clearance, training and mine awareness, military and police training, boundary demarcation, civil administration, provision of assistance to and repatriation of refugees, reconstruction and development of war devastated areas.
Peace- enforcement has close conceptual and practical links with cease-fire enforcement. In this case, forces are used in a war to stop aggression by one state or group against another. The operative principle underlying peace-enforcement is the use of coercion. As Trevor Findlay clearly observes:
Enforcement is used in the sense of coercing a state or sub-state group to
do something it would otherwise not wish to do. The difference between an
enforcement activity falls on the question of consent. If the consent of all
the parties involved is not forthcoming, then the action taken is necessarily
an enforcement activity.
Post- Conflict Peace-Building suggests that Peace-Building is a Post-War phenomenon. It is basically an attempt to consolidate and build upon peace that may have been brokered at the end of a conflict. The former UN Secretary – General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who developed the term, argues that:
Peace-Making and Peace-Keeping Operations, to be truly successful, must come to
include comprehensive efforts to identify and support structures which will tend to
consolidate peace and advance a sense of confidence and well-being among people…
these may include disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of
order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory
and training support for security personnel, advancing efforts to protect human rights,
reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and
informal processes of political participation.
The process of Peace-Building is much more difficult in reality than its description portrays. This is because peace has eluded the numerous conflicts in Africa, and where it has been brokered, it is usually of a fragile nature in this light, five dimensions along which the process of post-conflict rebuilding must be pursued are:
1. The first dimension involves political rebuilding which is based on a long- lasting political settlement that defines a power-sharing arrangement between
erstwhile disputants, and is backed by a constitution.
2. The second dimension is the necessity for social rebuilding which involves the revitalization of war victims and ex-combatants.
3. The third dimension involves psychological rebuilding. This necessity is based on the fact that communities that have survived the ravages of war are, usually deeply traumatized.
4. Fourth, there is the need for judicial rebuilding in which a new and credible judicial system is established that is capable of protecting fundamental human rights as well as investigating war crimes, where the need to do so may arise.
5. Lastly, there is the dimension of economic rebuilding in which destroyed assets must be replaced, and the foundations for the creation of employment and the regeneration of economic growth must be established.
Human Security: Don Hubert states that globalization has brought many benefits, but it has also meant a rise in violent crime, drug trade, terrorism, disease and environmental deterioration. He argued that “it clearly does not follow that when states are secure, people are secure”. He further argued that “greater exposure to violence is not limited to people in situations of armed conflict. It is also directly related to the erosion of state control. This decline is most evident in failed states where governments are simply incapable of providing even basic security for people threatened by warlords and bandits. Challenges to state control can also be seen in the expansion of organized crime, drug trafficking, and the growth of private security forces. The term human security may be of recent origin, the ideas that underpin the concept are far from new. For more than a century-at least, since the founding of the international committee of the Red Cross in the 1860s – a doctrine based on the security of people has been gathering momentum.
The specific phrase, human security, is most commonly associated with the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report…the definition advanced in the report was extremely ambitious. Human security was defined as the summation of seven distinct dimensions of security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political.
From a foreign policy perspective, human security is perhaps best understood as a shift in perspective or orientation. It is an alternative way of seeing that world, taking people as its point of reference, rather than focusing exclusively on the security of territory or governments. Like other security concepts-national security, economic security, and food security- it is about protection. Human security entails taking preventive measures to reduce vulnerability and minimize risk, and taking remedial action where prevention fails.
Environmental Security: It deals with the containment of a range of threats or contradictions emanating from the interaction between human beings and nature. This can either be in the form of the extraction of natural resources or their transformation into food, goods and services for livelihood purposes or for profit. Dabelko and Dabelko provide a basic definition of environmental security from a global perspective as a:
…transitional idea, the core of which holds that environmental degradation and depletion,
largely human-induced, pose fundamental threats to the physical security of individuals,
groups, societies, States, ecosystems and the international system.
Also, there is a continues debate between those Hyden describes as the realists, the liberals, the moralists and the populists- over the notion of the security- environment nexus.
DEVELOPMENT:
Among social scientists, no precise conceptual definition has so far succeeded in clearing the normative overtones and the ambiguity with which the term development is loaded. It has been defined as a widely participatory process of social and material advancement (including greater equality, freedom, and other values) for the majority of the people through gaining greater control of their environment (Rogers, 1976; Rodney, 1974:3).
To Berger, development broadly means “good growth and desirable modernization” because the values that need to be injected into the definition are those aims at minimizing human costs. As he elaborately puts development is not what the economic and other experts proclaim it to be, no matter how elegant their language. Development is not something to be decided by experts, simply because there are no experts on the desirable goals of human life. Development is the desirable course to be taken by human beings in a particular situation (Berger 1976:59).
Development aims at the satisfaction of man’s economic and socio-cultural needs in the most effective and rational way. According to Wignaraja, national development means: development of every man and woman-of the whole man and woman-and not just things, which are merely means. Development geared to the satisfaction of needs beginning with the basic needs of the poor who constitute the world’s majority: at the same time, development to ensure the humanization of man by the satisfaction of his needs of expression, creativity, conviviality and for deciding his own destiny (Wignaraja, 1976:5)
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
This focuses national development on the economic-particularly the growth in economic output or income expressed as size of the gross national product (GNP). This is usually computed as the ideal possible amount obtainable when the GNP is shared per citizen of the nation- i.e., per capita (CAP). Notably, in this approach, national development is a nation’s growth as measured by the size of the GNP/CAP at a specific time period. Here, the use of growth rate may cautiously be de-emphasized in recognition of the problem of possible data in consistencies across countries, over time.
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
That man is an end of development implies that the product of development efforts must fulfill the basic needs of man (Grant, 1976; Streetan and Burki, 1977; Weaver et al., 1978:21-22).
It has thus been argued that growth in output or income by themselves is not an adequate indicator of development. So, after reviewing the different alternative measures presented through a world research project on the issue, Hicks and Streetan of the World Bank concluded:
Obviously, the rapid growth of out put will still be important to the
alleviation of poverty, and GNP per head remains an important figure.
What is required (in development measure) are some indicators of the
composition and beneficiaries of GNP which would supplant the GNP
data, not replace them. The basic needs approach, therefore, can be the
instrument for giving the necessary focus to the work on social indicators
(Hicks and Streetan, 1980: 91).
Thus, several alternative but significantly supplementary and interrelated operational definitions/measurements of human development are applicable in development studies. These measures include the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI), the Human Development Index (HDI), the Human Poverty Index (HPI), the Gender – related Development Index (GDI), and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). In each of these measures, national development as human development is a nation’s score on an index of basic human needs.
According to the UNPD (1997), the concept of Human Development recognizes that “the process of widening people’s choices and the level of well-being they achieve are at the core of the notion of human development; the three essential choices of people being:
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to lead a long and healthy life,
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to acquire knowledge, and
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to have access to the resources needed for decent standard of living.
Other choices include political, economic and social freedom, and the opportunities for being creative and in enjoying self-respect and guaranteed human rights.
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
The concept of political development has hitherto been confused as a result of the definitional direction given it in the 1950s and 1960s by diffusionists and western social scientists. In this perspective, political development is viewed as the problem (politics) of developing nations, anticipating a state of order and stability, role differentiation, pattern of change, and institutionalization.
Accordingly, David Apter, (1965) distinguished between development, modernization and industrialization. He defined development as a process involving the increased specialization, as a process that occurs predominantly in non-industrial societies, means the transposition of certain roles, professional, technical, administrative- and the transposition of institutions supporting those roles – hospitals, schools, universities and bureaucracies. On the other hand, social scientists with non-western orientation (e.g. Ilchman and Uphoff, 1972; Markovitz, 1977) conceive political development as the achievement of a life worth living for the majority of the people.
Accordingly, political development could be operationally defined as the amount of improvement of the quality of life of the people of a nation attributable to the operations of the political systems (usually a constitutional government and the democratic political culture).
THE DIGITAL DIVIDE REVOLUTION
With in the last three centuries, the world has witnessed several revolutions that have served to widen the gap between the underdeveloped countries and the highly industrialized /developed countries – Agrarian Revolution, Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution or the Cultural Revolution. The most recent is the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Revolution and by far (in terms of speed and influence) the one that is exerting the most covert and perhaps the most devastating impact.
The world has indeed changed so fast those national development strategies of the 1950s and 1960s sound like child’s play at the dawn of the 21st century when nations face development challenges that are far beyond the grasp of the traditional development strategies. Thus, at the dawn of the 21st century, Nigeria faces more complex challenges of national development resulting from the post-industrial revolution and the attendant globalization and dual-globalization problems. Nigeria has become one of the casualties of the ICT revolution and therefore suffers the consequences of dependency in a global environment that is largely technology-driven. ICT revolution has taken a life all of its own so much so that the gap between Nigeria and the products or the producers of the products get astonishingly wider. This gap is what Prof. Oyelaran-Oyeyinka called the “Digital Divide”. The digital divide is the huge and widening gap created by the ICT infrastructure between the developed and developing countries.
In fact, the challenges of the digital divide to Nigeria are something close to a national emergency. In facing this emergency, Nigerians must disabuse their minds on the dangerous assumptions of leap-frogging. Technology is power; practical knowledge is super power. Any nation with any amount of knowledge (education) in its citizenry (human resources) can be a member of the comity of nations; can posses an army; can fight wars; can influence or subdue other nations through diplomatic maneuvers or even winning some wars over weaker nations. But it takes the acquisition of practical knowledge (technology) to be a super power. Nigeria needs to begin to provide strong platforms/foundations for industrial and ICT investments.
If Nigeria secures all these qualities without leadership it amounts to nothing. Leadership from the Utopian point view states that man and greed (poor leadership!) are responsible for any crisis seemingly posed to mankind by science and technology. Hence, the need for highly moral individuals to support and manage government so that the government could in turn control the destructive forces that man has created. It is only this kind of person, according to Rodee, “upon whom the authority to govern should be conferred in the present age”.
THE IDEOLOGY OF GOOD GOVERNANCE
Technocialism, according to Unanka, is the technocrats’ political culture with a technology bias. Technocialism is designed to drive the political leaders and bureaucrats of a developing country towards industrialization and technological development in the 21st century. Like nationalism, it is a top-down ideology of governance rather than an economic system, and therefore must not be confused with socialism per se. rather, it is a system where political executives and bureaucrats with a revolutionary self-reliant technology culture, emerge through an aggressive socialization process or through a cultural revolution to control and manage the capitalist system of production towards technological development and technological progress.
If the leaders possess the right ideology and govern well, they will successfully socialize the relevant productive culture to the people. The nationalist ideology of governance that secured political independence for the African nations germinated first in the political leadership before it was transmitted to the masses. Hence in the pre-independence era, nationalism served as the right ideology governance. Today, in the pre/post-industrial era in Nigeria, technocialism becomes the right ideology of governance. The prefix “techno” covers both technology and technocrat, while the self-reliant, human development and nationalist content of the ideology is implied in the suffix “cialism”.
For Nigeria to be a force to reckon with in the comity of nations, it must embrace technocialism. It means the morality of good leadership is the ideology of good governance. Nigeria calls for men of good morals, wisdom and superior leadership; we are calling for men with the right ideology of governance. In this connection, national development does not happen by chance; it is planned, directed and managed by men and women in government who truly believe in the ideals of good governance. Good governance also requires effective development administration.
Above all, good governance is ideology-driven; it is culture-driven. A unique form of political culture drives good governance. The political leaders and bureaucrats (i.e., the Executives) of Nigeria must possess the right type of ideology or political culture that is pro-self-reliance, pro-human development and pro-technology as a component of culture. In this sense, good governance is technology and therefore cultural. As a mind-set, an ideology of governance could be a product of the economic mode of production, as in welfarism, which is a product of the capitalist mode of production that drives the executives of most industrialized capitalist nations.
The ideology of good governance is the powerhouse of national development; it is the political culture of the operators of governance, applied for the effective mobilization of the human resources for technological development; for effective R&D, de-globalization of the economy and the institution of a self-reliant, human-centered development.
As we search for this unique ideology of governance, we may propose the simultaneous operation of capitalism and socialism at the general (mode of production) level and at the leadership (directional) level respectively. At the general production level, the capitalist system may be preferred for its relatively higher productivity potentials. But at the directional (leadership) level, a new unique ideology of governance with a non-Marxist socialist flavour is inevitable. We shall call this ideology of governance technocialism.