Faced with the cold-blooded murderous consequences of illegal arms circulating in the country, the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, has directed police commands in the states and Abuja to start mopping up arms. This is to give effect to the Firearms Act 2004, which prohibits certain categories of arms and ammunition in the hands of individuals and unlawful possession of lethal weapons. It is so critical to the IG that the process will not be driven by police commissioners alone but in conjunction with the Assistant Inspectors-General of Police in the 12 zones.
The alarm bell had for long been ringing that 70 per cent of illegal weapons circulating in West Africa were in Nigeria. The inherent danger is what the country is reaping now. This is why there should be no half measures in the mopping up of weapons. Everybody’s life is in danger – civil populace, police and the military.
The disarmament targets suspected militias, bandits, herdsmen, vigilante groups, neighbourhood watch, individuals and groups. With effect from February 28, when the directive was published, a 21-day ultimatum was given for the surrender of weapons, after which defaulters would be arrested, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with extant laws.
This move does not surprise anybody. Since January, Nigeria’s landscape has unremittingly been flowing with the blood of the innocent, arising from Fulani herdsmen’s killings and rampaging banditry. In Benue State, 73 people were killed by herdsmen in January; another 24 were massacred last week. Taraba and Kaduna states have remained killing fields; just as gunmen and cross-border bandits left no fewer than 50 dead last month in Zamfara State.
In Rivers State, the year began with 22 people returning from a church service gunned down by a group of gangsters. Rivers and Lagos states are the haven for rival cult groups, whose gun battles for supremacy usually leave scores of hapless citizens dead.
Equally dreadful are unending imports of high-calibre weapons illegally into the country and the cache of arms and ammunition surrendered by criminal gangs at the instance of some governors in pursuit of their amnesty programmes. The latest of such, by Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State, which yielded a colossal harvest from militants in the creeks, left President Muhammadu Buhari’s jaw dropping.
This eerie situation has lingered for too long. From some criminal hideouts in Anambra, Edo and Rivers states, more than 8,741 arms and 7,014 rounds of ammunition were seized in 2013. These seizures rattled the then IG, Mohammed Abubakar, to direct other state police commands to mop up illegal arms.
In Anambra State in 2014, the trial of three suspected kidnappers produced an incredible display of sophisticated weapons in court as exhibits. In their possession were AK 47 rifles, GPMG rifles, rockets, rocket propellers/launcher, 5,830 AK 47 ammunition and 1,135 rounds of ammunition for GPMG rifles. Late in 2016, 2,000 criminals surrendered 911 AK 47 rifles and 7,363 rounds of ammunition in Rivers State and were granted amnesty by Governor Nyesom Wike. Similar steps had been taken in Imo and Zamfara states.
The destructive effects of these weapons in wrong hands compelled Buhari to shake off his lethargy last Monday and begin commiseration shuttles to the most affected states, with Taraba as the first. Benue, Zamfara, Yobe and Rivers states will follow.
Without question, the government is responsible for these massacres with its abysmal failure to enforce laws and the security agencies’ connivance with criminals. Fact sheet: the 661 pump-action guns consignment cleared at Apapa ports in 2017, but later seized by Customs special squad, easily entered the country because the importer bribed State Security Service operatives, including the police, with N1 million. The suspect, Mahmud Hassan, made this stunning revelation in court. Similar lethal consignments might have entered without being detected. If the Apapa ports could be so compromised, the racket at the land borders, most of which are unmanned, could be unimaginable.
The bad eggs in the police are not helping matters. In 2014 an Assistant Superintendent of Police was paraded at Force Headquarters, Abuja as the supplier of arms to a 45-member criminal gang. He did so with seven other police personnel. The gang reportedly paid between N230,000 and N250,000 for each of the 16 AK 47 rifles it got from the ASP.
Not even the President can say what happened to the illegal weapons mopped up before now. The police command in each state should give an account of them. We believe it is a good starting point to implementing a credible illicit firearms control. Police racketeering in these illicit weapons, as the ASP’s criminality portrays, compellingly recommends this measure.
While the destructive result of illegal arms in the hands of terrorist, criminals, militias, thugs and delinquents are so obvious, it is important, however, that this initiative is not turned into a witch-hunt or a partisan operation. Recent pronouncements by Idris and other senior officials over the Fulani rampage have provoked justifiable fears of partisanship. Local youths and vigilante groups have also accused police of moving in to arrest and disarm them when they gather to fend off attacks, but are nowhere in sight when their villages are being attacked and razed.
Defence Minister, Mansur Dan-Ali, railed against vigilante groups set up by some state governments in desperation after the police and military serially failed to protect their people from incessant attacks by AK 47-wielding Fulani militants. Idris also bizarrely asked state governments to establish cattle ranches for the private businesses of cattle owners before passing anti-grazing laws, an undisguised display of partisanship by the country’s chief law enforcement officer.
It is obvious that the subsisting monopoly of law enforcement by the Federal Government has collapsed. State governments should, therefore, be allowed to equip certain official vigilantes with light arms to complement and collaborate with federal security agencies, a format that is working well in the North-East region.
Staunching the proliferation of arms requires the authorities to adopt the Kenyan model of setting the weapons ablaze publicly. For instance, in November 2016, Kenyan authorities burnt 5,250 firearms, with the Deputy President, William Ruto, supervising the operation. The IG should get the message: armed robbery, kidnapping, cultists’ gun riots and the genocidal activities of herdsmen and other armed groups bloom when the state surrenders its power to outlaws.
The culture of appeasing criminals to give up a token of their weapons for cash is a perverse strategy. If it had been effective, policemen would not have been ambushed and beheaded in the Ogba/Egbema Ndoni Local Government Area of Rivers State last year, after Wike’s amnesty gesture. Therefore, government should wake up and put criminals in their rightful place – arrest and prosecute them – while also addressing the general security lapses that compel some citizens to illegally acquire firearms for self-help.
