| dc.description.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. | en_US |
