Citizen-Centric Diplomacy: The Challenges for Nigeria’S Defence and Security in the 21st Century

Abstract

Since Chief Ojo Maduekwe intimated the public about the new focus and strategy of Nigeria's foreign policy under his watch, many commentators have set to town to either demolish or support this vision. This strategic refocusing of foreign policy in Nigeria he called citizen diplomacy. In a nutshell, 'Citizen Diplomacy' requires the government of Nigeria to more consciously resort to the calculi of the basic needs, human rights, and socio-economic welfare of the citizen in conducting bilateral and multilateral engagements with other nations. This may sound fairly prosaic, but, its normative implications and transformative potentials are enormous. This paper titled “Citizen-Centric Diplomacy: The challenges for Nigeria’s Defence and Security in the 21^st Century” is divided into five chapters. The study is basically a historical research method relying mainly on secondary sources of data from internet sources, official documents and country websites as the method of data collection. We made use of qualitative-descriptive analysis as our method of data analyzing the secondary data. The major and the challenges of  Nigeria’s   defense and security in the 21^st century. Thus we were able to make the following principal findings that, one, the citizen-centric diplomacy has not been able to enhance the achievement of Nigeria’s defense and security interests. Two, that the citizenship diplomacy has not been able to ensure protection of Nigerians in Diaspora. On the basis of this, we recommend, one, that there is need to improve or transforming positively Nigerian’s internal political environment. Two, that there is need to reform the ministry of Foreign Affairs itself necessary for improved implementation of the citizen diplomacy. Three and lastly, hat there is need to reform the entire government to evolve good governance necessary for transforming Nigeria.