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Menace of Small Arms

This Day (Lagos)
EDITORIAL
December 5, 2005
Posted to the web December 6, 2005
Lagos
With the end of the civil war in 1970, Nigeria moved from a relatively arms-
free society to one under siege by gun-toting criminals. To halt the fatal
slide, the government responded with constituting armed robbery and fire-arms
tribunals that year. Thirty-five years later, and with scores of armed
criminals executed by firing squads in well-appointed public places, the battle
against armed criminality is far from won.
Infact, the situation has deteriorated steadily over the years. Days back, the
inspector-general of police, Mr. Sunday Ehindero, was forced to raise the alarm
about burgeoning circulation of small arms in the country, with a
characteristic police understatement that it was a potential threat to
security. "On a weekly basis, we recover these arms," the police boss lamented,
"but the more we recover, the more we discover there are more out there."
Mr. Ehindero thereafter proceeded to confirm the stale news that the
circulation of small arms has become a trans-national phenomenon which was why
the West African Police Chiefs Committee (WAPCCO) had to meet in last month.
As the police chief of the federation, Mr. Ehindero has every right to be
worried, and possibly have duodenal ulcers over the proliferation of small arms
in the country. But he simply can't afford the indulgence of throwing up his
arms, with the excuse that police efforts are being frustrated.
In a country such as this, with an astronomically rising population at a time
of constricting economic opportunities, crime is most likely to flourish like
bay leaves. With increasing globalisation and technological growth, it would
have been a rare exception if crime did not in turn defy national boundaries
and become more sophisticated. That is what is happening to Nigeria, with
increasing circulation of fire-arms being a subset of the larger picture.
The challenge before the government and the police authorities is how to rise
up to the occasion, not to bemoan it. The first step to this would be a
comprehensive identification of the sources of these small arms.
One of the major sources of arms on the African continent are the numerous wars
of liberation and civil and ethnic conflicts, from the period of decolonisation
through the Cold War era to the latest battles to unseat both military and
civilian dictators. When the wars end, the small arms find their way into the
larger society. Given the number of wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote
d'Ivoire and so on-- and the peace-keeping roles our soldiers have played in
these theatre of war--it is to be expected that small arms would flow into
Nigeria.
The second source is politics. The police cannot claim not to aware that during
periods of electioneering, politicians arm their private armies to do battle
with their opponents, to intimidate the electorate and to rig elections. As
soon as the elections are over, the political paymasters abandon the thugs,
along with weapons, to their own devices. It is these products of political
gangsterism that have graduated into ethnic militias.
Another is illegal bunkering. Those engaged in the theft of oil, especially in
the Niger-Delta, have standing armies to engage naval and other security
personnel, in battle. An ugly spin-off of the unlawful trade is the
encouragement of a general breakdown of law and order in the operating
environment through hostage-taking and inter-ethnic conflicts for which the
bunkerers, presumably supply arms. As a matter of fact, trading in fire-arms is
the likely collateral to the business of illegal bunkering.
A fourth source of illegal small arms in the country are the armouries of the
police, the military and the other security agencies. It is no secret that some
of the weapons in possession of armed robbers and sundry criminals belong to
these security agencies. Mr. Ehindero himself has been confronted with
situations in which his own police armourers confessed to selling arms and
ammunition to robbers. Even the president has said that the sophisticated arms
being purchased for the police sometimes find their way into the hands of armed
robbers.
Finally, there is a thriving business in the local manufacture of small arms.
Local blacksmiths are known to fabricate lethal weapons and have turned their
trade increasingly from traditional hunters to armed robbers.
The point to all this is that a well-funded and equipped policeforce should be
able, through detective work, to isolate these sources of small arms and deal
with them decisively. Of course, an inter-disciplinary approach involving all
the security agencies has to be adopted in view of the multiplicity of the
sources of these fire-arms. All of this presupposes a thorough in-house
cleansing since some of the security agencies themselves are implicated in the
crime.
Above all, the government needs to follow keenly the United Nations programme
around the globe to recover small arms where they have fallen into illegal
hands to draw on the efficacious portions of it for our domestic application.

   

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