By John Amoda
Civil War is recognised as such because it always produces during its course more than one government while the existing but threatened state protects the sitting but also embattled government.

Contemporary Libya has shown this to be the case. Before the sack of Tripoli by the group labelled Rebel Fighters by the Press and Civilians by NATO and the UN Security Council, there were two governments, the Government of Gaddafi in Tripoli and the Government of the National Transitional Council, NTC, in Benghazi.

United States- led NATO with its monopoly of the air-space over Libya secured the Benghazi Rebel Government and functioned as the means of attack on the Gadaffi Libyan state. Libya thus enables us to see clearly the difference between the institution of government and that of the state.

These two institutions have distinct functions: governments administer the territories and the peoples inhabiting these territories because they are the militarily supreme in the territories they militarily occupy. A civil war leads initially to unequal division of territories constituting the country according to the military balance of power in the fields of battles.

At a stage in the Libyan civil war Gadaffi’s forces fought to destroy the rebellion limited in its control to Benghazi. Until Benghazi was wrested from the control of the Libyan police and security forces controlling the territory- and the people in Benghazi under the rule of the Libyan Government, the conflict in Benghazi could be described as unrest and revolt.

As the protest developed into insurgency through armed attacks on the Libyan authority in Benghazi leading to the overthrow of the Libyan Government in Benghazi, Libya became a country in the condition of civil war. The Libyan authority had been destroyed in Benghazi, thus giving the Rebels the opportunity to assert their claim of sovereignty first over Benghazi and ultimately by a process of civil war to establish their sovereign control over Libya.

Whether the Rebels would have been able to hold Benghazi on their own and in time to establish their control of Libya without the US-NATO anti-Gadaffi regime change policy, the present course of conflict in Syria shows that Gadaffi may well have destroyed his enemies confined to Benghazi.

However, because the international community has not yet decided to intervene militarily in Syria to effect a regime change, the Syrian protest has also not evolved into a civil war. Ensuring that protests do not evolve into a civil war explains the iron-fist policy of the Syrian government. In the above remarks inheres the security challenge in what President Obama calls the transition to democracy in the Arab world. Africa and the Middle East are presently hotbeds of protests, violent criminality and regime change campaigns. The options that all governments in these two regions face, are alas, not many: they can champion the anticipated democratisation of their regimes- a political change that involves more than staging credible, transparent and free elections; they can, like Syria, mobilise the whole spectrum of their powers of state to secure their government and thus to prevent the escalation of protests into civil war. Finally they can prepare for external regime change interventions in the fashion of the invasion of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, aerial and boots on ground.

The implications for Nigeria in the above analysis are to be appreciated as the current security challenge of this government. Nigeria’s security situation must be understood. Is the situation the crisis of state building? Or is it one of the crisis of state failure?

Is it one of instability generated by contestations among rivals over state building? Or is it one of anarchy resulting from stalemate in the course of these contestations? It is such a complex task to define empirically what is presently the Nigerian security situation. What however will not be effective remedy is to think that the way out is crisis control.

Crisis prevention is not the same as crisis control. External aid can be useful for control, but not for prevention. Prevention is the outcome of parties-in-conflict statecraft.

Control is third party help to the sitting government and therefore bound to escalate the crisis. One hundred days in office is not enough for serious analysis of Nigeria’s security situation but quite enough for the beginnings of serious apprehension of its scope.