350m Illegal Arms In Nigeria?

The United Nations last week expressed
concern over the 350 million illicit
weapons which, it claimed, are in wrong
hands in Nigeria. According to the world
body this figure accounts for 70 per cent
of the estimated 500 million small arms
and light weapons (SALW) in Africa. To
say the least, the figure is as outrageous
as the implications of the proliferation of
arms itself. Everyone has been scared
stiff to speak about the matter or
challenge the UN, except a South East-
based civil society group, the
International Society for Civil Liberties
and the Rule of Law (Intersociety). The
military and other security sources have
neither responded nor disputed the
veracity of the information volunteered
by the director, UN Regional Centre for
Peace and Disarmament in Africa
(UNREC), Olatokunbo Ige, a Nigerian
lawyer and diplomat.
While it will be foolhardy to wish this
away, we recall that a couple of years
ago, a former chief of Army Standards
and Evaluation, Major-General Shehu
Abdulkadir, had alluded to the fact that
70 per cent of the 10 million illegal
weapons in circulation in West Africa
were in Nigeria and this was corroborated
by the Conference of the Parties to the
United Nations Convention Against
Transnational Organised Crime (COP-
UNTOC), last year. This contradicts the
present figure by UNREC. We doubt if the
proliferation had shot up by 5000 per
cent in two years! If this is so, the
country would have ceased to exist by
now because if 350 million illicit small
arms and light weapons are in circulation
and in wrong hands in Nigeria, with a
total population of 174 million, it
translates that to every Nigerian there
are at least, two lethal weapons. That is
an outlandish prognosis. We feel this
figure requires further interrogation to
confirm its veracity.
While we are certain that the UN is not a
frivolous body and we have no
contradictory statistics to doubt Ms Ige’s
report, we believe that circulation or
proliferation of illicit arms, no matter the
number, is dangerous and will further
exacerbate the nation’s security
situation. Our over-stretched law
enforcement and military facilities and
intelligence community will now have to
redouble their efforts at quelling all
security threats across the land.
We are disturbed about the dimension of
profiling Nigeria as both a producer and
consumer nation of small arms and light
weapons. The country is trailed by
Liberia and Sierra Leone that have
recently emerged from pernicious
decade-long wars. Regrettably, more than
half of these are in the hands of non-
state actors and criminal groups who use
them as militants and oil thieves in the
creeks, campus cultists, kidnappers and
armed robbers in the hinterland, religious
insurgents and political thugs. A more
sordid dimension to this is that Nigerian
terrorists have grown in sophistication to
produce and employ bombs and other
improvised explosive devices as tools of
their vicious trade.
Tracking down and investigating the
brains behind these activities have
become herculean tasks. Nigeria has
demonstrably shown nuanced
incompetence on strategy and logistics
for identifying criminals and their foreign
collaborators. In 2009, our apparatchiks
apprehended a Ukrainian plane fully
loaded with arms and ammunition in
Kano, another lorry-load of arms heading
for Lagos was impounded in Ghana the
following year. Also a year later a serious
diplomatic rift between Nigeria and Iran
was fuelled by the arrest in Apapa ports
of 13 containers of illegal weapons from
that country.
Lack of reliable data banks for forensic
investigations like DNA profiles and
fingerprints, have compounded the
absence of coordination among security
agencies mandated to quell violence in
the country. They need to go back to
the drawing board to curb this menace.
We need, as a matter of urgent national
importance, to address the issue by a
combination of diplomacy, psychology
and tactics in order to mop up these
arms, sensitise the citizenry and
decisively deal with illicit gun runners,
users, makers and financiers. Source, leadership