National Security In Nigeria: Issues And Challenges

Traditionally, national security is defined as building up the defence, security manpower, and amazing weaponry so that once a threat arises, the state can meet the challenge. The state's energy and resources were concentrated on military manpower and armaments. The new concept of national security has moved beyond military variables to embrace and encompass social, economic, education, healthcare, spiritual, national image, cyber, cultural, political, environmental and even technological variables. Contemporary scholars in this field believe that security must be seen from a comprehensive viewpoint for a nation to be secure. Therefore, This book has used these new national security variables to assess national security in Nigeria to conclude if the nation-state is well secured. In this sense, bad press, bad laws, food scarcity, bad governance, lack of transparency and public accountability, unemployment, hunger, poverty and so on became critical in the security calculus of a nation, as threats. It is on these variables that the Nigerian nation-state has been initially assessed by this book to know if the Nigerian nation is well-secured or not.