THE QUEST FOR NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE CULTURE IN NIGERIA: ARE WE THERE YET?

Santrauka

Most stable democratic states have institutional national intelligence culture as part of their security pivot for sustainable democracy. In the same vein, transitional democratic states strive to build virile national intelligence cultures as part of their intelligence reform agenda to shift from radically ideological trappings or shifts from militarism, despotism to liberal democracy. This study takes a comparative and analytical review of such transitional democratic states in Europe, the Americas and Africa with a view to evaluating Nigeria’s efforts at evolving a national security culture. Drawing from historicist content analysis of secondary data from books, reports, journals, gazettes etc., which were logically extracted and arranged to approximate sound qualitative research technique, the study found out that Nigeria’s quest for a national intelligence culture is bedevilled by the challenges of nation building, ethnicity, religious and several other primordial sentiments. In the same vein, the study found out that the collective political will and patriotism needed for a virile national intelligence culture is largely lacking in Nigeria. These national intelligence cultural deficiencies are rooted in the centripetal sociocultural and political forces pulling the country apart into different directions and denies the country the opportunity to develop a sustainable national intelligence culture found in other political climes. It is therefore needful for a revolutionary overhaul of the current national building trajectory with a view to evolving a national intelligence architecture in tandem with a standard national intelligence culture.