A security expert, Mr. Matthew Ibadin, has called for the establishment of Arms Control and Licensing Authority to deescalate the increasing circulation of small arms and light weapons in the country.
Ibadin, who is the chief executive officer of Badison Security, Ibadin, in a statement yesterday in Lagos, said Nigeria’s security forces continue to engage kidnappers, bandits, terrorists and other violent criminals in a battle of wits, the agency was imperative.
He said kidnapping of citizens in the last nine years has become the order of the day with an increased frequency and intensity across the country in the last two months of December 2023 and January 2024, especially in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
Ibadin said the federal government through an Act of the National Assembly should establish an Arms Control and Licensing Authority to be in charge of documenting all illegal arms intercepted by the Nigerian Customs Service or those recovered from unauthorized persons, the army, police and other security agencies.
“All arms collected or seized from criminals should be in the custody of the Arms Control Agency and Authority with a view of ascertaining at any point in time the number of illegal arms recovered from various parts of the country,
“The Arms Control and Licensing Authority would be saddled with the responsibility of also conducting a total audit of all weapons in the custody of the military, the police and all other arms bearing security agencies on behalf of the government, so as to ensure accountability and global best practices on arms management.
“It should be headed by a civilian security expert who can carry out due diligence without fear or favour, while commending the various security agencies particularly the military and the police for doing their best, he pointed out that a lot more was expected from them,” he said.
Going forward, he suggested that the focus should be on evolving a detailed security architecture with the police being at the nucleus of co-coordinating all anti kidnapping operations in the country.
He emphasised the need for police personnel across all ranks to continuously engage in training and retraining with a view to technologically upgrade themselves.
He mentioned the need for the acquisition of tracking equipment and training on the tracking of stolen phones should be made available to the Nigerian police, divisional and outpost personnel and private security companies.
He further said the police should collaborate with cyber security experts, private investigators as it is obtainable all over the world.
“A situation whereby kidnappers are asking for ransom to be paid in bitcoin makes the situation so complicated that if they are not trained for it, they cannot solve the challenges,” he said.
He stated that as long as they have this single digit security architecture whereby the police are under the exclusive legislative list, they can never solve the security challenges confronting the nation.
“The present policing system is reactive instead of being proactive, therefore, they need to dismantle the present inefficient policing architecture, where it would be expunged from the exclusive legislative list, and moved to the concurrent and residual list enabling state governments to create and manage their own local policing architecture,” he said.
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