Evidence of the easy accessibility and pervasiveness of illegal firearms abounds everywhere in Nigeria. Hardly a week passes without reports of hair-raising killings and violent crimes of one sort or another perpetrated with these weapons. Herdsmen killings with AK47 assault rifles are daily occurrences. Armed robberies occur hourly while kidnappings have become commonplace. Murders and political assassinations carried out with arms have remained on the upswing.
Thus, when last week the Federal Government raised the alarm on the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the country, it was a long overdue wake-up call not only for the security agencies but also the citizens to be more alert to the dangers of illegal firearms and the need to keep them out of the country.
The Minister of Interior, Major-Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazzau, who issued the alert in Abuja, explained that the arms were brought into the country by former Niger Delta agitators, Boko Haram insurgents and other politically sponsored activists, often with the aid of officers manning our porous borders. The minister spoke at an emergency security meeting of heads of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Nigeria Police Force, the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) and other security organisations. He expressed government’s commitment to ending the proliferation of arms and light weapons in the country.
There can be no doubt that without the easy availability of weapons, the rate of violence in the country would not have spiked to their present levels. And, while we commend the minister for alerting the security agencies and the people to this problem, the government stopped short of proffering measures to stem and reverse the trend.
It may be impossible to stop hardened criminals from having access to weapons, but every effort must be made to ensure that the sources of those weapons are traced and the arms merchants prosecuted.
For years, the government’s response to this problem has not been encouraging, given the fact that numerous killings and massive destruction by herdsmen were perpetrated with arms and yet not a single herdsman had been arrested, tried and convicted.
Nigerians are also eager to know the identity and intentions of the importers of three consignments of high caliber pump action rifles intercepted by security officials.
The Federal Government has confirmed a United Nations report which said that 350 million ((70 percent) of the 500 million illegal firearms circulating in West Africa are in Nigeria. There is no doubt that the unstable political and military situation in Libya which began in 2011 has led to the massive movement of weapons within the region and beyond.
The civil war in Mali and other flares within the Maghreb and West Africa probably also contributed to the proliferation of illegal firearms. But, it is obvious that we are not doing enough to counter the threat that these weapons pose to our security. There is no evidence of diligent prosecution of violators of firearms laws; there is no known consistent pursuit of the arms merchants, and no systematic investment in the recovery of illegal weapons.
In October 2016, the Rivers State Government amnesty programme for 22,430 militants, agitators, criminals, cultists and other shady characters yielded about 1,000 firearms, 7,661 rounds of ammunitions and 147 explosives. These recoveries might sound like a drop in the bucket, yet we know what damage a single rifle in the wrong hands can do.
We, therefore, urge the government to invest in weapons recovery through direct appeals to citizens, and by offering some incentives for people to hand in their illegal firearms. Police divisions in other lands use such methods to reduce the number of guns in circulation and their level of gun crimes.
Weapons, however, go where they are demanded. The government, in addition to providing the citizens with conditions for good living, must above all else promote peaceful, harmonious co-existence within communities, thereby making the weapons unnecessary.
