EVALUATION OF HUMAN SECURITY UNDER THE CONSTITUTION

Abstract

Human security is about human life and dignity expressed as freedom from fear and freedom from want. To that extent human security has in its embrace issues such as environmental degradation, human rights, equity, maximizing human potentials, health, labour standards, organized crime, small arms proliferation, religion, ethnicity, gender identity, governance, civil society, hunger, and internal conflict. A state’s provision for the guarantee of human security of her citizens is the basis for her success or failure because the sovereignty of the state is guaranteed only if it derives from the sovereignty of her citizens. This article argues that by placing the all-important positive rights with human security potentials and reciprocal citizens’ duties to the state in a part of the 1999 Constitution that is not justiciable, the Nigerian state has robbed itself of the recipe for survival and risks failing as a state. This work advocates the integration of diplomacy, military force, intelligence, law enforcement, internal security, education, health and human services into a single system that can respond to basic threats to human security of citizens such as terrorism, weapons proliferation, climate change and hunger by sweeping reforms that will synchronize the fundamental objectives of state policy with the fundamental rights provisions of the 1999 Constitution so to erase the notion of a chasm between the state and her citizens and guarantee survival of the Nigerian state.