Aspects of Human Security, Social Justice and Sustainable Development in Africa: Nigeria as a Case Study

This paper analyzes the relationships between selected aspects of human security-poverty and health security, social justice and sustainable development in Nigeria, representing the African continent. Human security, an emerging paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities, is widely defined as consisting of seven key areas. However, the aspects of poverty and health security are selected for this study because of the overlapping effects on all the other aspects. Data for the conceptual and theoretical section of the paper are drawn from secondary sources and complimented by data from primary sources. These include events analyses by the author and content analyses of documents such as United Nations (UN) Human Development Index (HDI), Legatum Prosperity Index and Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) for a selected period. Research methodology is case study based.The paper’s main finding centres on the levels of poverty and threats to health security that have confronted majority of ordinary Nigerians in the past two decades despite the country’s huge material endowments. In the light of this, the focus of knowledge in the country’s immediate and distant future should be human security and not state-centric security.