National Security and Nigerian Foreign Policy in a Globalizing World

Nigeria’s emergence at the global scene in 1960 was heralded with great excitement across the world. Her potential prosperity was strong enough to match her promising and purposive behavior at the international arena. Her radical and swift disposition to issues that borders on national interest, national security and liberation of Africa left no one in doubt about her conduct of independent foreign policy. Sadly, however, corruption and economic mismanagement which resulted to national impoverishment and sequential collapse of her republics also witnessed Nigeria’s foreign policy took a dive to the realm of timidity. This lack luster conduct has raised doubts about the capacity of a sovereign Nigerian State. In an intensely globalizing world order, therefore, the fact of eroding state sovereignty has had severe implication for Nigerian national security in particular and her overall developmental drive in general. A quantitative study which relied extensively on secondary data including official reports, published and unpublished textbooks, peer reviewed journals and newspaper editorials, the paper adopted as its theoretical framework dependency strand of the neo-Marxist political economy. The paper went on to argue that Nigerian’s dependent economy cannot sustain a purposive and dynamic foreign policy that guarantees national security. Relying on study findings, the paper recommends that in a globalizing world order, skills of foreign policy experts as well as sound economic measures be harnessed by Nigerian policy class to navigate through the thorny but necessary route to national security.