Ademola Araoye
Meanwhile, as highlighted earlier, national security is internally focused. But it is a particularly vague term that contracts and expands according to the motivations and whim of the state establishment. National security relates more to the maintenance of a desired symbiotic relationship of the citizen and the state that is anchored in the liberal understanding of the state. Illustrations abound in our recent history. For a Mohammadu Buhari regime in Nigeria, surrounded by the usual coterie of sycophantic hangers-on that are mobilized on perpetuating partisan hegemonic control of the state, the invasion of national territory by Buhari’s transnational kinsmen alien to the Nigerian state space sacking and renaming “conquered” towns and villages across the country for over a decade was not perceived as posing a threat to national security. For the Buhari administration, the invaders had to be accommodated by the indigenous victims of the foreign marauding terrorists. At another level the political class taking turns in their roulette of ruinous rule of the state present another dimension to the challenge of national insecurity. The members of this nation-wide gang are determined to infinitely extract fiscal values and other benefits illicitly for personal and clan aggrandizement. This crime is legally perpetrated at the expense of the prostrate society. The monumental open theft has bankrupted the state. Yet, for this class, expressions of dissatisfaction by disaffected constituents is perceived as mortal national security threats. Rather than deploy civil and conflict management tools to enhance the attainment of pacific resolutions of legitimate grievances, the feeble exertions of the marginalized or disaffected are defined as national security threats that are deemed to require the use of military force. The reality though is that negotiations to resolve agitations can be arduous while the outcome of such interactions, though constructive, may diminish access to perks illegally siphoned by the elite drivers of the compromised establishment. In this manner, the state poses a threat to the welfare and the legitimate interests of the citizen. By extension therefore, the illegitimate and often criminal interests of the political elites that inform policy responses to legitimate grievances become a threat to the longevity of the state. No armed intervention can solve that problem.
Policies and structures that historically evolved from the dominant governing theoretical models and paradigms of strategic national engagements in the specific contexts of their external environments are often associated with apprehensive state establishments. As operational pitfalls are recognized in the complex turns of the factual, the strategic response pivots are systematically refined to react in a proactive manner to evolving exigencies. The evolutions of note are in both internal situations of the state, depending on the sociological construction of the applicable universe, in often critical intermestic (international-domestic) linkages that are finally expressed in the fragility of the external environment. The complexity of the sociological construction of the African states, in particular West Africa, and what has proven to be disruptive character of intermestic relations is a particular salient element in strategic policy formulation in that universe. Attaining homogenized strategic policy thrust by any state actor in an intermestic neighborhood may often prove to be illusory. The decision of a southerner led administration in Nigeria to go war in Republic of Niger, a vast country with a large Fulani/Hausa community, was divisive internally in Nigeria on that account. Intersmesticity refers to the implications of transnational affinities and loyalties of ethnic groups whose traditional communal spaces straddle artificial colonial boundaries of two or more countries. The transnational communities perceive themselves as one people, despite international boundaries that pass through the territories that they have traditionally claimed for their respective communities. Although the community may be distributed in states across many contiguous international boundaries, they behave as cohesive units with common interests and stakes in their interaction with other transnational communities that they encounter in all those spaces. These encounters may take place in the context of conflicting interests in the various states sharing common borders in which their members are represented in varying strengths. Often there are as many transnational communities as the number of communal units that straddle the international borders of the post-colonial African state. They are recognized as competing aggregates with legitimate stakes in the informal discourses and interactions in the intermestic environment in which the post-colonial African states are located. They are natural stakeholders in developments within each formal political entity in which its members are represented, whether as a majority group or a minority. In both instances, the ultimate wellbeing of the whole community in all the states that their members are found is paramount to policy. These interests often override definitions of the national interests of all the various states. The implications of supranational sensibilities have become more evident in the post-Cold war era that has been marked by behavioral transformations of African states.
Strategic policy making, particularly in this setting, is an infinitely delicate dynamic engagement that requires constant analytical probes at the different levels of the operational theaters. This is necessary to respond policy wise to the intricate anatomy of the challenges that are in a constant state of flux and transformation. National security therefore presents many paradoxes. While firmly located in a particularistic state, it is delinked from any specific geographical moorings. It is not a specific reality that exists entirely in space. Ronald Steele is categorical that national security is a function of definition, does not exist entirely in space. It is thus an abstraction that is internalized on the basis of concrete realities. In defining national security, the concrete realities are therefore the central imperative. That does not seem to be the case in analytic and policy interventions in West Africa where state establishments, such as in Nigeria or Cote d’Ivoire or Sierra Leone, are deliberately delinked from the challenging realities of compromised legitimacy of their respective statehoods. State establishments, in their deafness and dumbness to excruciating existential conditions of the people, are then the primary source of insecurity to the state.
National security thus equates the security of the interests of whatever aisle has managed to capture the state in the struggle for totalistic partisan occupation of the state space. In the context of entrenched Africanized democracy that has hollowed out all the core substantive tenets of practice of classic democracy, the benefit of pacific periodic system recalibrations to achieve structural equilibrium that is integral to classic democracy is vitiated. There are indeed many analytic frameworks to deconstruct the anatomy of conflicts and proffer proactive approaches to their civil management without institutionalizing further killings fields in Africa through a permanent misalignment of the conventional role of the military from defense against external threats. The accent here is the imperative to infuse absolute respect for the empirical and public spiritedness as a core tenet in the ruining class. These must be reflected as critical variables in the normative tools deployed in the analysis on which the designs of the management of conflict are anchored. Realism and constructive politics are at the heart of stability in multinational states. Not guns, nor coercion. That is what distinguishes true patriotic engagements in the public realm in more sophisticated environments from mafia-like criminal gang rings of circulating phony statesmen in pursuit of partisan loot instead of the good of the public that pervade environments such as ours. In this setting, the truly nationalistic military establishments are always put in a difficult location between the demands of professionalism against the backdrop of continued loyalty to elements whose toxicity endanger the life of the state.
In reflecting a dearth of analytic realism in the policy formulation process or in deliberately protecting the same elemental interests arraigned against the consolidation of post-colonial statehood, sadly, the end products are convenient policy postures preferred by bogus state establishments. In this, the process merely uncritically appropriate historically problematic conceptual frameworks that serve the purpose of the establishment instead of advancing the ultimate wellbeing of state and society. These policies also unfortunately assume unimaginative coercion-inspired modalities to clearly complex multi-dimensional internal and external security challenges. As the Marshal plan and the combined fiscal and other underhand but targeted interventions by the United States in Greece and Iran in the immediate post WWII demonstrate, the tendency to latch on to a narrow vision to both international and national security and defense has proven disastrously ineffective. Recourse to less dramatic ploys are often in vogue in sophisticated climes. This has been so even in the environments from where these concepts originated. The idea of soft power of the state to overcome the crisis of skewed patterns of national distribution of values, implying assured state equity, and domestic diplomacy are germane in the advancement of national security objectives. Such approaches have achieved more encouraging results than military interventions in intra-state relations.
Accordingly, the answer to domestic restiveness lies in a constant process of social engineering through credible democratic practices that shore up the legitimacy of the state. In extreme cases where the scale of killings in disaffected constituencies reflect inflexible determination to actualize national sovereignty have been abundantly manifest, it may be prudent to reengineer colonially inherited political contrivances by breaking up the mechanically cobbled dilapidated political spaces, albeit through negotiated settlement. The welfare and integrity of humanity must triumph over any pretensions of implacable sanctity of the state. The state in the young millennium must not degenerate to the status of a blood thirsty god that eats up its children to live. Africa cannot afford that shameful reputation of a willing slaughter house of disaffected communities to keep an unworkable union alive at all and any cost. At the other end of the spectrum of options, the workable formula may even entail the structural consolidation of sociologically aligned people separated by colonial experience who are determined to create a new expanded strategic space as in Association of Sahelian States (AES). Throwing the military against every imaginable crisis with deep seated sociological, political, economic underpinnings has failed miserably in Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Tchad, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and in even Western Sahara. It would also surely fail in the coming instability in Togo, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire. New thinking and a new vision are thus required. Above all, the cultivation of good praxis of authentic democracy would solve half of the problems of Africa.
**Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).
Leave a Reply