Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in Nigeria is providing the platform for a potentially explosive entry into national security analysis. On April 16th, Nigeria’s Prof Jibrin Ibrahim will be delivering a public lecture on “Setting Benchmarks for Enhanced Security and National Unity”
The lecture will be coming from an activist political scientist with legs in academia, public policy and the civil society. This lecture promises a Nigerian contribution to the debates that have followed the concept of (National) security recently. The concept is still the mystery concept in post-Cold War analysis.
Academics and policy stalwarts are still quarrelling about what it is now, how it can be guaranteed in the age of textuality, virtuality, pre-emption, signature campaigns or targeted killings, the disappearance of territory and the age of ‘everywhere war’, etc? There is the particularly stubborn question whether some countries can still talk about (national) security in the age of the ‘predator Empire’ (when security of big players can be “realised by topological power that folds the spaces of the affiliates (suspects in global borderlands) into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland?”).
A critical distilling of the national security space in Nigeria since 2009 from each and every of the above themes can provide data for the kind of argument that can temporarily stabilize what (national) security is all about and what the benchmarks for enhancing it in relation to national unity could/should be in Nigeria.
It stands to reason that security operatives in the intelligence arm, the military and paramilitary sector, party leaders, top bureaucrats and civil society mandarins would be keen or expectant about what Prof Ibrahim would have to say.
