Banned weapons stoke deadly Nigeria violence
KANO, Nigeria: A flood of illegal small arms has swamped Nigeria, bringing with it a surge of violence that has left hundreds dead. Boko Haram Islamists, whose insurgency has killed at least 20,000 in the northeast since 2009, have long been reputed to have received weapons smuggled from North Africa. But a recent influx of small arms is also fuelling violence in other arenas, including clashes between cattle herders and farmers in central states. It is also adding to the plague of kidnapping and cattle-rustling by gangs in the north of the country, and of armed robbery and attacks on oil installations in the south.
“Without the firearms... we would not have the kind of violence of the magnitude we have today,” Interior Minister Abdurrahman Dambazau said in January. In April, Kano state police commissioner Rabiu Yusuf said the solution to illegal weapons was clear: “We need to put them out of circulation.” Doing that is a tall order, however. The United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament (UNREC) has said more than 350 million small arms and light weapons are circulating in Nigeria - nearly two for every member of its population. Nigeria accounts for some 70 percent of the 500 million or so weapons thought to be in West Africa, UNREC director Anselme Yabouri told a conference in Abuja in December last year. Periodic seizures are made: on May 31, soldiers on patrol in the southwest intercepted three trucks carrying boxes of ammunition from Benin. But with some 4,000 km of borders - most of them porous - Nigeria has struggled to stem the tide.
In Nigeria, there is no legal right to gun ownership and regulation is by the president. Civilians are banned from owning handguns, military rifles or machine guns. Licences can be obtained from the police for double-barrel shotguns and hunting guns, but permission for this has been suspended because of the security situation. President Muhammadu Buhari has blamed the 2011 fall of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and its chaotic aftermath for the rise in the smuggling of prohibited arms.