Immigration boss blames porous borders for influx of arms

Comptroller General of the Nigerian Immigration Service Mr. David Parradang has lamented the porous nature of Nigeria’s borders which he said is being used for the movement of arms and illegal immigrants into the country.

Addressing

the

Senate committee on Interior during the 2014 budget defence in Abuja yesterday, Mr. Parradang said his service lacks the needed equipment and personnel to man the borders because, according to him, they are “open fields”.

“A lot of illegal immigrants can come in and a lot of arms can be moved in and we have complained severally that there are many unmanned routes, illegal crossings, that no control post had been stationed in these areas and the more we keep them open without providing effective security in those areas, the most exposed the country is to security challenges. So we felt that the budget should look squarely at these areas of border issues,” Parradang said.

He said that immigration needed to have integrated plazas in those areas and deploy censors and radars that can pick movements across the borders.

“It is not too much to invest in security. If the first line is broken then we cannot be able to provide security,” he emphasized.

According to him: “N160 million for motorcycles is a far cry from what we requested. We need patrol jeeps in the north and boats in the south-south. The budget did not take care of that. We have a lot of illegal immigrants in Nigeria and they constitute insecurity in our land where we cannot have complete data on them, cannot intercept, screen and take them out of the country,” Parradang said.