By Obi Nwakanma
Nigeria’s national security doctrine has long been based on a theory of good-neighborliness. This doctrine is based on assumptions that Nigeria as a nation is no threat to her neighbours and therefore has no reasons to fear external attack.

It is a model that has long viewed Nigeria’s greatest security threat as internal – the prospect of internal implosion given Nigeria’s complex national architecture. It has frequently been said that Nigeria’s multi-ethnic formation makes internal cohesion difficult and challenging.

The struggle between the major ethnic groups in Nigeria has also always been viewed as the battle for a “do-or-die” domination of nation; a mindset that first came to fore with the politics of Ahmadu Bello and his political allies who thought and circulated the idea that a more modernised South was a threat to northern political and cultural autonomy.

The South, Ahmadu Bello feared, would dominate the north, and the north therefore was compelled to secure itself by creating notions of a northern Moslem exceptionalism.

The North-South divide has thus become the litmus for Nigeria’s national politics and for clearly determining its potential flashpoints. The narrative of a “Christian South” and a “Muslim North” has been propagated for so long that the underlying falsehood of that generalization fails to take account of a more complex realpolitik at play in that characterization of Nigeria’s internal fault lines.

The Nigeria-Biafra civil war hardened these fault lines, and indeed has determined the basis of Nigeria’s national security doctrine that has for long shaped the character of its operations.

The end of that war, it has been suggested, saw a triumph of the north, and therefore the domination of post-war Nigeria by northern interests. There is of course, let us be clear, a more fundamental truth: the civil war was not fought by the “Muslim” north, it was fought by an alliance of nations with both a local and global reach seeking to secure vaster interests in Nigeria.

But it has since become the test case for the internal battle for Nigeria in which the north is staged against the South, and particularly, the South-East. The north has also been seen mostly from the now quite pejorative lens of the “caliphate” – meaning the geographical interests and affiliations associated with the Jihad of the Sheik Othman Dan Fodio, General of the Ottoman army, whose military conquest of the Hausa states in the 18th century was part of a larger expansion of the Ottoman imperium.

There is a sense across modern Nigeria, that the imperial quest of the Sokoto Caliph, masked as a religious movement, was always political. Held in abeyance by colonialism, it was bound to reconstitute and reassert itself in the postcolonial era – that quest to “sink the Koran” in the Atlantic.

These underground ideas and its narrative of an unfinished conquest have found great logic in the linking of all northern power to the House of Dan Fodio and its remnant oligarchy.

The facts are of course more complex. In other words, there may indeed be such a complex network of intrigue fashioned from the north to shape modern Nigeria by sword towards a gaze to Mecca and the prophet, but that battle has been staged in the backdrop of a Nigeria negotiated into being as a modern nation on a more complex, secular, and liberal ideas.

Nigeria’s national security doctrine has been based on the containment of the internal disjunctions that both criminalizes Nigerians as well as victimizes them. But its basis is the dilemma of the question of who controls Nigeria internally based on the two attitudes: one, of a quest for a national secular spirit, and the other for a national Islamic spirit.

This battle for the national spirit has raged for so long however that we have lost sight completely, it seems, of its international dimension. In our absorption with internal crises Nigerians lost sight of the external factors that goad or threaten her. Nigeria’s security doctrine has for so long been based on the premise that Nigeria is not at war with her neighbours, and therefore has felt no external threat to her existence as Africa’s potentially most powerful nation.

But Nigeria’s size and potential power and influence continentally is a source of worry and trepidation to certain empire builders in Africa.

Sometime ago, the Libyan president, Colonel Moumar Ghadaffi publicly called for the dissolution of Nigeria and its reorganization into two countries on the basis of an “Islamic North” and a “Christian South.” Ghadaffi’s formula overlooks the complexity of Northern Nigeria; the fact that an absolutely “moslem north” or “Christian South” is ignorant fiction.

But one fact however is that the Libyan leader is at the core of a move to re-shape the balance of power in Africa, absorb Nigeria, or at worse, reduce her capacity, and he is therefore not a disinterested umpire in the business of Nigeria. Yet his suggestion might appeal to quite a few people.

There are many who say that Nigeria in its current shape is unworkable and an African albatross. Yet it must also be said that Nigeria’s national capacity provides an important staging ground for achieving the Zikist vision of a powerful black nation with global implications.

The quest to build a modern African nation based on the egalitarian spirit is threatened today by the interplay of local and external forces building up against it. There are suggestions by some diplomatic sources of a neo- jihadist movement penetrating the fibres of the nation, operating in closeted but extremely high places, and organized and well-financed, and placed at the ready to scuttle a potential “Southern” presidency.

The sum of my argument is that Nigeria cannot afford this. She certainly faces an external threat that must compel a review of its national security doctrine. The recent seizure of a large cache of high value military-grade arms shipment at the Lagos ports ought to raise the hackles for the authorities in Nigeria.

This was a lucky break, and perhaps also, the result of good intelligence. The connection of these weapons to Iran is troubling, and the Federal government must get to the bottom of this. It is also clear that the federal government has only apprehended the small fry in this apparently broad  plot to unleash terror on Nigeria.

It must also give us pause, as a nation, to ponder the implication of all the various acts violence, kidnapping, robberies, and so on, and connect the dots of a potentially wider plot of powerful sources funding Nigeria’s national incoherence.

It is now crucial to reorganize Nigeria’s national security apparatus – its ports and border security; its police and intelligence systems; and so on – to countermand these threats without compromising the basic human rights of innocent Nigerians.

The security at Nigeria’s famously porous borders must be strengthened to disrupt any possibility of in-land importation of dangerous arms and even mercenaries who may threaten the peace of Nigeria.

The president and his national security staff must be plain with Nigerians. Nigeria’s security services must flush out, disrupt, and prosecute individuals, irrespective of stature, who are in the thick of any plot to subvert Nigeria. Iran’s involvement must also be closely examined to see if the Iranians are arming terrorist cells in Nigeria.

The Iranian arms import must be a test case. There is, to use a cliché, no smoke without fire.