*Leadership, Security And National Development* Security and what it constitutes can take many forms. However, it is all about the survival of an individual, a group or an entity such as a state. It should be noted that there is a duality in every country’s security challenges, and these manifest as the internal and external factors that shape its state of security. Due to socio-political and geo-political peculiarities, every nation’s security challenges and imperatives are, to a large extent, unique. This is why the security situation of one country, with its attendant implications for peace and national development, can be very different from another’s even when their external security challenges are similar. Although national security problems arise out of conflicts or threats within or outside a given nation, how these conflicts are resolved, managed or contained is critically dependent on the effectiveness of existing governmental institutions for conflict prevention and resolution. This also entails the disposition and orientation of leadership at local and international levels. Social chaos is, therefore, often a manifestation of a failure of government machinery or governmental systems as may be revealed by a thorough and dispassionate examination of past conflicts. Indeed, government never became necessary until humankind saw the need to invent systemic machinery for managing social crisis and maintaining public order. This is why there is the need to look at the evolution of a formal or governed society as we know it today. Overwhelmed by hazards in the unorganised natural environment and by the antagonistic effects of his own primitive self-centredness, man, generically speaking, needed a “neutral” authority to protect his life, family and property. Formal society thus developed out of this basic need to preserve oneself and one’s possessions. Organised society evolved over a long period before the dawn of civilisation as we know it today. Political thinkers, notably the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), argued that individuals, persuaded by enlightened self-interest, traded off the insecure “state of nature,” where only freedoms existed, for a state of society governed by a central authority that enforced the rights of everyone. The state of nature, according to Hobbes, was not only “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” but also in its entirety “anarchic.” The emergence of centralised government, responsible for common security, is therefore meant to curb the excesses of selfish and unscrupulously competitive individuals. Although the modern nation state is commonly the most developed form of the state of society, monarchy, a crude form of centralised social order in medieval times, had preceded it. Under the monarchical dispensation, the people were ruled by supposedly divinely appointed kings who reigned indefinitely, often for life, before yet another king took over to, literally, lord it over the populace. With time, it became clear that what the people needed was governing machinery, not a ruling institution. Defining the nature of the relationship which should ideally exist between the state’s governing authority and the governed, John Locke (1632—1704) stated that such a relationship should be in the form of a social contract that is subject to periodic public renewal of confidence. According to Locke, the authority of government should be based on “just powers from the consent (i.e. delegation) of the governed.” This gave rise to variants of the social contract theory, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, that became the bases of the evolution of systems of government powered by periodic elections. Thus, in the event of the elected authority losing the confidence of the public, the people, under the Lockean social contract system of governance, reserve the right to change it through the ballot box or, if necessary, by violent means. By this stance, a revolution becomes justifiable as the last resort. It should be borne in mind that for one to talk of security and national development presupposes that there is a country or state and that there is a governing authority. A state or country is recognisable under international law only if there is a defined territory that is reasonably populated and has a de jure or a de facto government. A de jure government obtains in the event of a government in exile which is recognised by others. A democratic state, particularly one where the people directly elect the leaders, is usually founded on the basis of a constitution or some other governing set of rules. Such rules set out the modalities by which human rights and the state’s commitment to the provision of the basic needs of the people are guaranteed on a sustainable basis. For such a high level of expectation to be met, it would entail the formulation of policies and programmes for national development. The constitution would, of course, establish a structure of government and provide for security machinery to create an atmosphere conducive for individual pursuits and for government to prosecute its national development programmes. It is the lack of consensus on the best formula or set of modalities for the achievement of such objectives that engenders continuing debate, nationally and internationally, among politicians, opinion leaders, and the intelligentsia. The issues under discussion have always been choice of system of governance, leadership disposition and orientation, performance of the institutions of government and management of resources. Around all this is the spate of continuing debate on the need for strong leadership or strong institutions or both. The lack of consensus at the international level leads some countries or a bloc of them to resort to ideological warfare or armed intervention to persuade or cajole other countries to adopt certain socio-political and economic systems. This behaviour, which ensued for several decades, characterised the Cold War and still appears to be the pursuit of some powerful countries which act outside the dictates of the United Nations. With the ascendancy of the capitalist market economy system, following the apparent defeat of communism and the collapse of the communist bloc in the late 1990s, the intensity of the Cold War has greatly reduced. However, a strong undercurrent is still evident in some turbulent spots of the world.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 04:34:36 +0000
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