The Need to Integrate Security Culture into the Nigerian Secondary School Curriculum

The growing nature of global security threats and capabilities of terrorist has also become a burden in Nigeria like many other countries of the world. The impact of these threats in the minds of stakeholders vis-a-vis the proposed Nigerian Nuclear Power Plant should not be neglected. If not carefully and systematically integrated, poor security culture can jeopardize the prospect of the proposed nuclear power program in Nigeria. Culture as the major determinant of human reliability is hard to either impose or cultivate, but it can be fostered through models, training/education, and positive reinforcement and systematized processes. An effective nuclear security culture is dependent on proper planning, training, awareness, operation and maintenance as well as the credibility of the people involved. As commonly said \"catch them young\", security culture, if taught at secondary school level, a generation of well security informed individuals will be produced. This will ultimately pave a way to easy and fast integration of nuclear security culture into future workforce of the Nigerian present and proposed nuclear facilities. In attempts to explore more possible means of implementing nuclear security culture in Nigeria, this paper present a research carried out to systematically survey the present state of security culture in junior secondary schools students against safety culture with an aim of pointing out the need for integrating security culture in Nigerian secondary school's curriculum. Junior secondary school students of age between 10-15 years were studied using a questionnaire for safety and security awareness. The results obtained revealed that 80% of the students have good safety culture while only 1% of the students have good security culture. This clearly showed that much attention should be drawn to security education in Nigeria to obtain a secured environment where a robust economy can be built.