Election fever is nearing its climax again. With the Independent National Electoral Commission stepping up its preparations, politicians, consumed by their inordinate desire to win, are also mobilising underground. To achieve their sinister ambition, they are stockpiling weapons, with which they will arm their foot soldiers to perpetrate violence at the polls, warns the national taskforce on arms. Seeing that violence marred previous elections, the Federal Government should heed the forewarning by making it impossible for these evil gladiators to succeed.
The alarm by the National Taskforce on Small Arms, Light and Chemical Weapons matches the apprehension among the electorate about the likely dangers at the polls scheduled for February and March. Already, election-related violence has swept through Lagos, Kwara, Imo, Enugu and Taraba states. The Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara of the Peoples Democratic Party, alleged recently that a party had perfected plans to “unleash violence on the people of Bauchi (State) in the forthcoming elections” by procuring assault rifles for that purpose. This evokes disquiet.
Emmanuel Okereke, the Director-General of NATFORCE, traced the acquisition of weapons by desperate politicians to two factors, both of which are intertwined. First is the porous nature of Nigeria’s entry points – sea, air and, particularly, land. Second is the lack of a government agency to address the drift to anarchy. While his first point is spot-on, the second is debatable.
Between 2017 and 2018, the Nigeria Customs Service intercepted 2,201 pump action guns illegally smuggled into the country through the Apapa seaports. Live ammunition had also been seized in Lagos, Ogun and other states after escaping scrutiny at the borders. In line with Okereke’s warning, classified security items were seized in different parts of the country. Hameed Ali, the NCS Comptroller-General, stated that loads of military camouflage, caps, 10,100 pieces of inner military T-Shirts and 512 pairs of military jungle boots, were intercepted in Rivers State. In Ondo, Benue and some Niger Delta states, militants have surrendered a staggering collection of illegal arms.
Every election accentuates this dangerous tilt towards an apocalypse where voters are intimidated, harassed, maimed and slaughtered; and ballots boxes are snatched. The Human Rights Watch stated that 800 people died in the 2011 post-election violence in Nigeria. In the September 2018 rerun governorship ballot in Osun State, violent shootings scared away voters from exercising their civic rights. In 2015, election violence engulfed Rivers State, leading to several deaths.
The NATFORCE DG’s second point centres on the absence of a commission to tackle the menace. Okereke called for a law setting up one, arguing that a bill to that effect had been under consideration since the era of the Seventh National Assembly. Citing a 2017 ECOWAS recommendation, which mandated countries in the sub-region to establish such a commission, Okereke said Nigeria and the Gambia were the only countries that had not implemented the resolution. This is a controversial resolution.
As of June 2017, there were 459 ministries, departments and agencies in the country, the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation says. This makes the cost of running the bureaucracy prohibitive. How much bigger can the Federal Government get? Which was why, in 2012, the Steve Oronsaye panel on the rationalisation of MDAs recommended the scrapping of 140 MDAs and the merger of 14 others.
Although it is unfortunate that Goodluck Jonathan and his successor Muhammadu Buhari have not implemented the Oronsaye recommendation, the incumbent President should not compound the burden. Therefore, establishing another MDA – with its financial implications – is out of the question. To function effectively and bring the arms smugglers to account, NATFORCE should be subsumed under any of the existing security-linked MDAs.
To deter gun crime, Sweden and Germany, among others, operate strict gun control laws, which they review periodically. A 2016 study cited by the New York-based Business Insider said that Australia, Japan, Norway and Britain have nearly eradicated gun deaths. After a spate of disasters between 1990 and 1996, Australia devised new gun control measures that cut gun deaths drastically. After two national tragedies in the United Kingdom, in which Matt Ryan massacred 16 people in Hungerford and Thomas Hamilton slaughtered 16 schoolchildren and their teacher in a Dunblane school, the authorities made it very difficult to own guns. There, and in Japan, even police officers hardly fire their guns. Norway, apart from strict gun laws, operates a system of social cohesion between the citizens and the authorities, which sociologists say makes for a peaceful society.
Therefore, the National Assembly should strengthen our gun control laws. Collaboratively, the police, Customs, the State Security Service, the Nigeria Immigration Service and NATFORCE should design how to recover the guns in the hands of hoodlums and non-state actors and prosecute all illegal gun owners.
Currently, Nigeria has just 84 official border posts, but smugglers infiltrate the country via 1,400 illegal border crossings, the NIS says. Through them, bandits have sacked communities in Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Sokoto states. Fulani herdsmen use arms smuggled through them to terrorise farming communities in Benue, Taraba, Adamawa and other states; Boko Haram operates freely in the North-East with sophisticated weapons, while militants, robbers, secret cult members and kidnappers are running riot in the South. Government should implement new solutions on border security, using intelligence and technology to aid the detection of gunrunning.
