NIGERIA’S NATIONAL DEFENCE POLICY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF ASYMMETRIC CONFLICT, 2007 – 2017

Abstract

Globally, governments evolve their National Defence Policies in order to address conventional security challenges. Countries such as the USA, the UK, France, India, and Kenya have had the need to modify their policies to address contemporary asymmetric security challenges such as terrorism, insurgency, guerrilla warfare and militancy. Although several academic works have been carried out on Nigeria’s security challenges and its management, none has given adequate consideration to the National Defence Policy (NDP) in the management of asymmetric conflict. This study was therefore, designed to interrogate Nigeria’s NDP, the extent to which the policy addresses asymmetric conflict, and the challenges of operationalising it. The Raymond Aaron’s Peace and War Theory was used as the framework, while an exploratory design was employed. Both primary and secondary sources of data were collected. Six key informant interviews were conducted with two academics who are versed in defence policy, two top military officers who were theatre commanders, one of the drafters of the NDP and a defence policy analyst. Four focus group discussions were held with senior military officers in the office of the Chief of Defence Staff and the National Defence College, Abuja. In-depth interviews were also conducted with community leaders in the North-East and the Niger Delta regions where the NDP was applied. Secondary data, including journals, newsletters were obtained from official defence sources. Data were content-analysed. Nigeria evolved its NDP in 2006, which was framed largely to deal with conventional conflict. This was however modified in 2015 and 2017 in response to the fledging asymmetric conflict and it contained strategies for dealing with the Boko Haram terrorism (insurgency) in the North-East and militancy in the Niger Delta. However, the application of these strategies remained complex and challenging because it lacked a standard operation procedure. The major implementers noted the lack of political will on the part of successive governments to implement the NDP, a lack of cooperation by military high commands and poor synergistic operations among security agencies, especially military field commanders as some of the major challenges. In-depth interviews revealed that challenges at the operational level included inadequate knowledge on the part of battlefield commanders. about the contents of the defence policies and excessive domination of the Ministry of Defence, which ought to be highly professionalised, by civilian directors who had limited knowledge of defence strategies and operations. Besides, the military was also poorly funded, ill-equipped and rarely supported by community members in the theatres of operation due to poor civil-military relations and trust deficit. Nigeria’s National Defence Policy has not been well implemented from 2007 to 2017 to adequately curtail the challenges of asymmetric conflict due to logistic capital deficit. Therefore, stakeholders should address these challenges to ensure its effective implementation.