Arms trade and national security

Last week, the Presidential Committee on Small Arms and Light Weapons revealed that Nigeria has become a major destination of arms trade and warned of more grave danger looming ahead. The committee chairman, Amb. Emmanuel Imoghen, made the disclosure while on a courtesy visit to the Director-General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Mr. Mike Omeri, in Abuja.
Beyond the flourishing weapons trade, the committee also identified a significant number of ethnic militia groups that are fuelling this trade across the nation, leading to the loss of 12, 000 lives in the beleaguered North-eastern part of the country alone, with the inherent humanitarian crises spiraling out of control.
At a time the insurgents strut and unleash violence on the communities under their control, using heavy armaments, the revelation of small and light weapons trade in Nigeria is very worrisome. The weapons trade, the rising wave of insurgency and allied crimes are, therefore, not to be treated with kid gloves. In March this year, the former chief of army staff, General AbdulRahman Dambazau, broke his long silence, when he declared that the stretch from Cameroon to the Mediterranean Sea is a free market for illicit drugs and weapons. As an expert in modern military warfare, Dambazau must have been speaking from an informed perspective.
As a matter of fact, the festering insurgency actually started while he was the nation’s number one soldier. Indeed, Dambazau went as far as to establish the nexus between drought and desertification in Lake Chad, describing them as the twin evils that opened a new dimension to unemployment and violent crimes. He had also warned: “We have to consider in particular the role of elements from Northern Cameroon, Chad Republic, parts of Niger Republic, parts of Southern Libya, and to some extent, parts of the Central African Republic, which were once under the Kanem Borno Empire. Small wonder, the insurgents operate mainly in the North-east, with instructions emanating from the cells they have established in those countries”.
Dambazau is not the only one raising the alarm on the bothersome state of insecurity pervading the country. Towards the end of last year, the National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki, raised the issue of foreign connections to insurgency and general insecurity during a security summit in Abuja. Early this year, a similar observation was made by the Director-General of the Department of State Security Services, Mr. Ita Ekpeyong, at yet another stakeholders’ conference on insecurity in Abuja, where he advised the media to “cease to be the oxygen for terrorists”.
We cannot fathom why the Federal Government has shown laxity in the domestication and implementation of the various international protocols and treaties on small arms and light weapons, to which Nigeria has been a signatory. The culture of blaming insecurity on opposition politicians is one conspiracy theory that should be discarded if meaningful breakthrough in the efforts to curb insecurity is to be achieved.
It would not be altogether misplaced to enlist the support of ECOWAS and the African Union in fashioning out a viable national security policy that is effective and dependable. It is commendable, however, that the Federal Government is collaborating, albeit belatedly, with Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic in the effort to find a lasting solution to the protracted security challenges. It is also interesting to note that the acting Inspector-General of Police, Suleiman Abba, has placed a ban on issuance of new licences for small and light weapons until the 2015 general elections are over. Be that as it may, these are measures that should have been applied long ago and the country could have been saved the embarrassing security problems, with dire consequences to our local and international image. There is also the compelling need to mop up these light weapons swarming all over the country ahead of the forthcoming polls.