Paper short abstract:

While legacies of violence and fragile institutions combine to give mainstream elites voice that prioritise its interest coalition, the interest and voice of broader social groups are silenced from leverage even within most indigenous African leadership against rule of law.

Paper long abstract:

In order to work with but not for elite interests, we need to understand how and why moving elites towards a more citizen-oriented leadership and law enforcement structure provide a difficult security perspective particularly in some African post-conflict contexts negating global leadership evolution and best practices to address critical issues of climate emergency, identity-based inequalities, poverty, violence, ill-health, resource plunder, and digital surveillance. While legacies of violence and fragile institutions combine to give mainstream elites voice that prioritise its interest coalition, the interest and voice of broader social groups are silenced from leverage even within most indigenous African leadership against rule of law. The focus of the study therefore, is to examine elite interest coalition in the context of indigenous leadership and law enforcement structure in Nigeria. It argues that elite interest antagonizes that wider population rendered vulnerable to violence abuse, predation making it difficult for them to become a force in their own right. In addition, the paper points to the indigenous social and institutional texture of post-conflict nature of power relations in the political settlement is less dense and resilient in Africa than in more developed world. Adopted as framework is Moore, (1979) Structural Functionalism perspective, qualitative approach and content analysis served for data gathering. Preliminary findings reveal that in contrast to citizen-oriented leadership, mainstream entrenched interest coercively imposes its will on minority indigenous elite to silence majority vested interest to frustrate rule of law as ideal for new leadership against global law enforcement challenges.