A constitutional based transformative approach to reform the security sector in Africa's post liberation war countries

The article reviews contemporaneous security sector reform (SSR) models and proposes an Afrocentric human security oriented alternative, a constitutional based transformative approach. The post-colonial security sector in African countries continues to struggle with converting and infusing the nationalist liberators’ underlying values into the new institutions and this has kept post-independence security provision skewed in favour of the new political elite. Post-liberation war African countries have undergone series of SSR that depicted some semblance of stability during the transition from violent liberation struggles that were mostly fought from exile, yet the possibility of intractable conflict is real. Decades after the retreat of colonialism, the national security apparatus in the region remains a source of both instability and insecurity in many countries. This proposed SSR constitutional based transformative framework is underpinned by three core concepts: participation; accountability and transparency that undergird the core of a participatory anchored security sector governance (SSG) approach. These elements are critical factors for influencing the transformation and decolonising of the post-colonial security sector in Africa into human security focused systems.