Defence Policy of Nigeria: Capability and Context
A Reader
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
A primer on institutional development and strategic deployment of the Nigerian Armed Forces. It attempts to analyse and comprehend the extensive and vigorous debate on persistent problematique and multiple disorders in the “core complex” of Nigeria’s defence posture (in terms of significant disharmonies or disequilibrium between the various component elements).
The Reader contends that this “disharmonies” owes its form and tragic dynaminism not to sheer oversight of defence planners or to “bureaucratic ineptitude and manipulation” but to the “culmination of choices and the interactions of processes framed by a technical-rational grammar of thought”. These interactive processes gravitate around and are in turn rooted in double antimony of class and function bearing on Nigeria’s position in the international division of labour. In other words, Nigeria’s defence problematique is fundamentally a resultant of its political economy and public policy: that even the decision a country such as Nigeria could take on defence (what weapons it buys abroad, for instance, how much and from whom) reflects not only preferences of defence planners, but also related both to its development policy and its “earning of surpluses from the international economy”.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
This Reader provides a structurally coherent explanation and review of the magnified role conception and organizational task expansion for the Nigerian military establishment in foreign policy. It argues essentially that one of the most problematic and intractable areas of public policy in Nigeria since the Civil War concerns the development of a professional defence establishment adequate to meet the challenges arising from the altered parameters of iour security environment.
The correction of this condition is the primary motivation of the Armed Forces modernization and augmentation program that touches upon all elements of Nigeria's military power. This Reader is at once a review and a critique of the major facets of this modernization and augmentation process of the Nigerian armed forces within the operative context of the changing dimension of threat perception and the strategic parameters that have guided Nigerian military planning since the Civil War in 1970.
About the Author
Celestine Oyom Bassey is a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at William Penn University, Iowa, United States of America. He was a Directing Staff and Sabbatical Fellow at the National Defence College, Abuja, Nigeria. He is the author of Contemporary Strategy and African Condition (Macmillan, 2005) and Co-Editor of Conflict Resolution, Identity Crisis, and Development in Africa (Malthouse, 2007) and Governance and Border Security in Africa (Malthouse, 2010).
Charles Quarter Dokubo is an Associate Professor at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Lagos, Nigeria. His copious contribution to the debate on security relations in Africa have appeared in national and international Journals such as Civil Wars (Frank C ASS), African Journal of International Affairs and Development, and Nigerian Journal of International Affairs.