Travelling on the Abuja-Kaduna Highway has become an unspeakable nightmare for Nigerians, thus highlighting the deteriorating state of security in the country. Last Monday, dare-devil gunmen kidnapped the Chairman, Universal Basic Education Commission, Muhammad Abubakar and his daughter; they also shot his driver dead. Many others have been declared missing.
It is an unremitting macabre ritual to which countless commercial buses and their passengers have fallen victim, with targeted private vehicles halted by a fusillade of bullets. This barbaric vocation reached a most embarrassing level in 2016 when the Sierra Leonean High Commissioner to Nigeria, Alfred Nelson, was kidnapped. In 2017, a former Commissioner for Education in Katsina State, Halimatu Idris, a Nigerian Army officer, his daughter and a police officer were killed in one attack near Gidan Busa village, others were kidnapped and many others wounded.
Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State had early last month, rescued hundreds of motorists held hostage on the road on his way to Abuja. The criminals blocked the highway, but were forced to flee when the governor’s convoy approached the scene of their operation around 3.45pm.
So dreadful is the highway that even military and other security personnel now avoid it, preferring instead, to travel with the new Abuja-Kaduna rail transport. The acting Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, in a pragmatic expression of his disgust, on Tuesday redeployed the Kaduna State Commissioner of Police, Ahmed Abdulrahman and five others. While unfurling Nigeria’s first quarter of the year crime statistics, the IG said 685 persons were kidnapped and 1,071 persons killed, across the country. Kaduna State’s 112 killed tally is second only to Zamfara’s 203 deaths.
Regrettably, each measure taken by every IG on the Abuja-Kaduna road security challenge has been a fiasco. Interestingly, the latest action came barely one month after Adamu launched what he code-named: “Operation Puff Adder,” targeted at taking the battle to the doorsteps of the criminals. His predecessor, Ibrahim Idris, also initiated “Operation Maximum Safety” in 2016 with 510 police personnel and 40 patrol vehicles. When domestic flights to Abuja were diverted to Kaduna in the wake of the Abuja airport runway repairs, about 300 police officers patrolled the road to protect air passengers, while three helicopters provided aerial surveillance.
Therefore, well-thought-out new strategies have become imperative. This is a fact a former IG, Solomon Arase, reiterated in a recent interview with this newspaper. Any effective response, he said, must be driven by intelligence, serious crime-mapping of the country towards identifying areas with the worst cases and corresponding deployment of personnel and equipment. Arase said, “There is a disconnect between the arrests that we make and the use of the judicial system to correct the issues we are dealing with,” in his disapproval of the lack of synergy between the police and the judiciary in prosecuting kidnap suspects already paraded. Indeed, law enforcement efforts will come to naught in a regime of crime without punishment.
Gun-induced security breaches have become routine because of the proliferation of small and light weapons. Since the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament raised the alarm in 2012 that 350 million of such weapons, representing 70 per cent of the 500 million in West Africa, were circulating in Nigeria, the authorities ought to have reacted with a pragmatic policy, mindful of the fact that the country has a Frankenstein monster to confront.
The Firearms Act 2004, which prohibits possession of certain categories of arms or illegal acquisition of lethal weapons, is one law the police must enforce now. Its dismal enforcement sustains this anarchy of gun violence. It cannot be addressed by mere appeals to such arms bearers to surrender them as is often done.
Nigeria needs to learn from Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan and Norway, which have successfully implemented gun controls, thus reducing their crime rates. In the United States, where it is a constitutional right for people to own guns, recent mass shootings and resultant deaths have rekindled the debate on gun control. Australia, hobbled by gun violence in the 1980s and 1990s, especially that of 1996 that left 35 people dead, dealt with the problem with a swift legislative response and a buy-back policy that removed 600,000 guns from its citizens and destroyed them. The UK government spent $200 million to buy back 162,000 guns and 700 tons of ammunition from its citizens.
But our own case is blatant criminality – unlicensed possession of guns, brandished with reckless abandon. Many of them are of the prohibited calibre, but freely smuggled into the country through our porous borders. The 40-feet container with 661 pump action rifles in 2017 intercepted by a Federal Operations Unit Squad of the Nigeria Customs Service, after it was cleared by Customs at Tin Can Island ports as “steel doors,” is a sore reminder. One of the suspects, Mahmud Hassan, confessed that he paid N1 million to a State Security Service official to clear the way for this impunity. Another contraband of 1,100 rifles also arrived through Lagos ports same year.
If this level of influx of illicit weapons could occur at the seaports, then the magnitude of trafficking at our 84 official land borders and the 1,400 others identified as illegal by the Nigeria Immigration Service, could be unfathomable. Consequently, the terrifying experience on the Abuja-Kaduna road suggests taking a hard look at our border controls in the states sharing boundaries with our West African neighbours. This is reinforced by the escalating banditry in Zamfara, often attributed to trans-border felons, who run to Katsina, Kaduna and Sokoto states in their bid to either escape onslaughts from joint military taskforce operations or in search of new prey.
