Tackling arms proliferation

The disclosure by the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, last week that the Federal Government is investigating the Gulf of Guinea as a major route for arms trafficking into Nigeria is astute.

This probe should not be made to peter out like previous investigations; the government needs to muster the political will to follow through with it and tackle arms proliferation in the country.

During a two-day seminar held in Abuja, Ribadu, who was represented by the Director of External Affairs, Office of the NSA, Ibrahim Babani, said probing the Gulf of Guinea route—the maritime gateway between Africa and the rest of the world—became imperative to curb arms and ammunition in the hands of non-state actors.

He decried that the “lucrative nature of the GoG in terms of natural resources, movement of ships and related economic activities attracts strange bedfellows and men of the underworld” noting that “though there have been reports on the proliferation of small arms and light weapons through the maritime sector, the government is interested in further interrogation of the GoG as a major route for arms trafficking.”
It should be recalled that the NSA’s new revelation came less than a week after he set ablaze some decommissioned, unserviceable and recovered illicit arms. These illegal arms come from locally manufactured sources, while others were misplaced or stolen from security agencies. The third category is arms from organised criminal groups smuggled into Nigeria.

Tellingly, the Gulf of Guinea which consists of 16 countries including Nigeria, has been a major route utilised by organised crime syndicates notably responsible for various devastating crimes such as drug, human trafficking, oil theft, kidnapping and smuggling of contraband goods.
The Defence Headquarters has also disclosed that the Libyan conflict and instability in the Sahel have allowed arms to flow into Nigeria, exacerbating the country’s cascading descent into insurgency.
Sadly, Nigeria’s “porous borders” have been considered “the primary source of proliferation of illegal arms into the country,” according to a report published by the International Journal of Social Sciences.

Tragically, despite Nigeria’s strict gun ownership laws, the country has been estimated to be the “biggest illicit firearms market,” according to the Institute for Security Studies, accounting “for 70 per cent of the 500 million illegal weapons in circulation in West Africa.”

These illegal arms are deployed by terrorist groups in the North, militants in the Niger Delta, political touts in the South-West, and also ethnic agitators and other non-state actors in the South-East. These weapons can bring down the government if their proliferation is not urgently tackled.

While it seeks to probe the major route of gun proliferation in Nigeria, the Federal Government also needs to critically examine why previous probes set up to this end have failed to achieve tangible objectives. The government must cast down ethnic agitations and explore the issues fuelling the discontent.

More importantly, the government needs to deal with the nagging issues of the country’s unmanned borders. Politicians should stop arming touts and military interventions should find ways of taking arms away from the hands of non-state actors. Security agencies should do their jobs and thoroughly prosecute non-state actors across the country.