Presidential monologue - Part 33

Good morning, Mr. President. In what follows, let me share with you this morning the paper, a paper I delivered on 22 August at the Annual Summit of Openlife, an online magazine, on August 22, 2024. Some useful tips below:

“I speak to the theme “Creating Enabling Environment for Economic Growth through Strategic Tackling of Insecurity” and begin with a story of a friend who has passed on. He was a peasant farmer. A few years ago, at the heart of the activities of the herdsmen who grazed their cattle on farmlands. He went to the farm one day and saw cattle grazing on his farm.

“He did not wait to see the face of the human herder. He simply ran away and went back home. This action has an obvious implication: abandoning his farm meant undermining his very means of survival. Therefore, security is very important to our existence and material production.

“Today, it is common knowledge that the country is insecure with the terrifying activities of insurgents, bandits, kidnappers, ritualists, and sundry criminal actors. Between 2009 and now when Mohammed Yusuf was summarily executed in Borno by the Yar’adua administration, the north-east of the country has been ravaged by the exploits of Boko Haram insurgents warranting the establishment of a division of the Nigerian army in the theatre of operation. New military hardware are being acquired to deal with the security.

“Social life is being daily securitised. Virtually every state of the federation has one vigilante group or another. New formations are being proposed or established such as school protection forces and forces to police illegal miners. Some of these approaches speak to the depth of the atmosphere of insecurity that is prevalent in the country today.

“Let me pose some questions that in my opinion may address our present concern, namely, creating an enabling environment for economic growth by addressing strategically the endemic and perennial insecurity in the country. I used the qualifier perennial because of the “endless present” that insecurity now constitutes in our country and has become a manifesto point for sundry politicians in the country.

“ First, what is security? Second, what is the referent object of security? Posed differently, security for whom? Thirdly, security for which values? I have posed these questions with insight offered by David Baldwin in his paper, entitled “The Concept of Security” published in International Studies in 1997. I believe the short answers to these questions may help us have a clear vision of the way forward.

“If we revert to the social contract theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke we discover a singular concern for security being the reason for willing into existence, the state, that abstract category that is the repository of the general will. It was the concern that prompted the eternal words of Hobbes who described the state of nature as one that is “nasty, brutish and short”. His solution was to create a leviathan, which many are trying to tame today in its authoritarian exertion.

“Arnold Woffers (cited in Baldwin) defines security as “a value of which a nation can have more or less and which it can aspire to have in greater or lesser measure… and the absence of threats to acquired values’. Values entail physical safety, economic welfare, autonomy, and psychological well-being at the level of the social forces in society and could be extended to the state itself, which is its political independence and territorial integrity.

From this viewpoint, the population and the state that provides a toga for it are the referent objects. This is why for Baldwin, security inheres in those policy measures that lower the probability of damage to acquired values. For him, it becomes meaningful to consider security from the point of view of two criteria, namely, Security for whom? And security for which values?

“I dare say that the national productive forces that include men and resources key to human survival are perhaps one of the greatest values that are embedded in the concept of security. The dominant approach today is to see security from a militaristic lens in terms of threat identification, and the consequent use of military force. But there is also human security that centres on the access and enjoyment of those things that make life meaningful, food, clothing, and shelter. These are not realisable in an atmosphere of insecurity.

“National productive forces already signposted in the above entail “human labour power and means of production (tools, machinery, factory buildings, infrastructure, technical knowledge, raw materials, plants, animals, exploitable land)”. Karl Marx, paraphrased by Karl Korsch, defines “a ‘productive force’ is, at first, nothing else than the real labour-power of working men; the force incorporated in these living human beings by which, with definite material means of production and within a definite form of social cooperation conditioned by those material means of production, they produce through their labour the material means of satisfying the social needs of their existence, that is – under capitalist conditions, ‘commodities’.”  In other words, the productive forces are the economic forces central to the production of material means of meeting our survival.

“The insecurity in Nigeria directly affects the productive forces, hence, the comatose nature of the national economy and the consequent bogey of hunger staring everyone in the face. Food crop production has become impossible due to the prevailing insecurity in the country. The unearned income from the sales of crude oil has been jeopardised by oil theft, which has reduced the country’s foreign exchange earnings and inclined it toward perpetual borrowing. This has undermined the strength of the national currency against major foreign currencies.

“The manufacturing sector, which is largely import-dependent for essential components, is hard-hit. Many companies have had to fold up compounding a sub-element of the insecurity in the country, that is, job insecurity. The indicators are so glaring: the exchange rate of the naira to the dollar is N1, 589, external indebtedness is 42,115.54 billion USD as of March 31st, 2024; the Corruption Transparency Index ranked Nigeria 145 of the 180 countries ranked.

“There is nothing new to say. But let us merely reiterate some of the things said in the past that have not lost their value. Diversify the national economy to create jobs and guarantee food security; re-orientate the security forces towards collateral functions and a doctrine that reverses the Glover Syndrome, which is turning their loyalty to the people who constitute popular sovereignty, not transient governments; stop the misapplications, misappropriation, and outright looting of national resources by public officials; make the refineries work; invest in human capital development through vocational education; address challenges to the survival, livelihood, and dignity of the people, not through palliatives; and prioritise the country’s interest, not private ones.

“It is to be noted that Nigeria has the potential to solve the state of insecurity in Nigeria. It has natural resources and the demographic capital to solve the problems that confront it. Is it not intriguing that a country that could lead peace initiatives in sister West African countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and restore democratic governance structure, is struggling to maintain social order in what I have referred to as the endless present? The answer lies in the failure of leadership and the absence of a patriotic nation-building elite. Serenading the corridor of power in the present is a crop of visionless and self-centred elite.

“For them, self-interest first, the nation last on the scale of preferences. They are incapable of securing Nigeria. Thus, a new social force is patriotic, and commitment to the security values we have identified is required to pull the country through these trying times.

“Let me end with the words of Late American General Jacob L. Devers, of World War II fame (cited in Baldwin), who noted that ‘National security is a condition which cannot be qualified. We shall either be secure, or we shall be insecure. We cannot have partial security. If we are only half secure, we are not secure at all.”
Odion Akhaine is Professor of Political Science,
Lagos State University, Ojo Campus.