‘Stopping illicit arms importation should be priority, not banning rice’

Retired Brigadier General Saleh M. Bala is the president of White Ink Institute for Strategy Education and Research (WISER) based in Abuja. He spoke to Daily Trust on the overwhelming number of small arms and light weapons in Nigeria and what steps should be taken to tackle the problem. There are conflicting figures about the […]

Retired Brigadier General Saleh M. Bala is the president of White Ink Institute for Strategy Education and Research (WISER) based in Abuja. He spoke to Daily Trust on the overwhelming number of small arms and light weapons in Nigeria and what steps should be taken to tackle the problem.

There are conflicting figures about the number of small arms and light weapons in the country. As an expert in security and strategy, do you have an estimate for these weapons?

I do not have an authentic figure to speak to because when you say they are illicit weapons, it means they are unmarked, they are unknown, nobody knows where they are. You can only estimate. When you make estimations, I wonder if those who make the estimations on what bases they make these estimations. Because these are smuggled, undeclared arms. Some of them have been in the arms of individuals and groups since the pre-independence period because the experience with small arms particularly is not a recent incident. If one would reflect, right from the period of the civil war, there has been this problem of illicit small arms and light weapons up to the period of the Liberian crisis, where you had some of our troops returning with arms they sold to the public and into the Niger Delta crisis, where light arms were brought in from ashore and to now with the problem in the Northeast. So when I speak of this, it is not like I am oblivious to the figures being bandied about but I would normally just say that it is pandemic. It is huge and widespread. Because when you talk of recovery of these weapons, have we ever had a campaign with a clear mandated agency to carry out the mopping up of illicit arms and have we ever mapped the routes through which these weapons come in even along our land borders?

Should the government and people of Nigeria be worried?

Definitely. Because now we have illegal guns that are contesting the numbers of legal weapons in this country. If you have a total of the armed forces and the police, the whole of the armed forces is under 400, 000. You have a total of 400, 000 police, then the paramilitary forces and intelligence agencies can be rounded up to 350, 000, which gives us about 1.2 million personnel. Even on the assumption that every single member of the armed forces is armed, you can relate these with the figures bandied about by international organisations and see. Even with the number of Boko Haram alone, they are about 2-300,000, it is a very serious problem. Remember that even by the estimate we made of the standing defense force, not everybody carries arm. So, even the armed forces do not have that number of small weapons, including those in storage. The illicit ones, including the   locally made ones that are also undocumented. So this is a very serious issue. Up until tomorrow, we don’t have any agency to regulate this because we are playing around the politics of the presidential commission and some other self-formed organisation that is trying to get recognition, just like the Peace Corps. Unless we agree that the menace of small arms and light weapons is a present and critical danger to national security and we task a specific agency or create one to deal with illegal arms, we will continue to face these issues.

How do you think an agency, if created, can tackle this problem?

By law. You have to mandate it by law, either to be supported by the armed forces and police because it is the police that has the foremost responsibility for national security. You also have to capacitate the police to be able to support this agency and be able to enforce the law on legitimising and confiscating small and light weapons and working with the Nigerian Customs to secure our borders and ensure these illicit weapons don’t come in. I don’t think our problem in this country is rice coming in through the borders. The foremost capacitation and charge that you will make to the Nigeria Customs is to capacitate their enforcement wing enough to carry out this task to secure our border so that illicit arms and ammunition don’t come into the country. Because right now, insecurity in the country is a major impediment to food production. Abuja is the political capital of Nigeria while Kaduna is the de facto military capital of the country, yet you can’t traverse the mobility corridor, which is just an hour and a half, between these two cities because of violent extremist groups armed with small arms. And in our agriculturally productive states, in the rural areas, our people cannot farm because of banditry. So, the problem of small arms and light weapons is a very serious problem.

In places like Liberia and the Niger Delta, during the amnesty, incentives were offered in exchange for weapons. Do you think this is a way to mop up these weapons?

It is, but you have to assure people of their security. For most people that acquire weapons, it is for their personal security and those of their families including the herdsmen today who are allegedly kidnapping people, it is out of the desire to secure their families and herd that they got weapons that they use today to terrorise people and we have bandits ransacking villages with basic assault rifles like AK47. To deal with this problem, our internal security agencies, especially the police have to be capacitated enough for them to carry out their primary responsibility and secure the country. If you have a weapon and you don’t have to use it, why keep it? What motivated the people of Liberia to hand over their arms was that they had fought themselves to some fatigue and were ready for peace. Secondly, that state was awash with peacekeepers that ensured their protection, which is an added incentive to give up their arms. I am not one to tell you to offer incentives to people to give up their arms because, even as a young major, I didn’t have such a voice but I was able to amplify it in those quarters, right from the time former president Obasanjo came with the policy to introduce a buyout policy for the Niger Delta, I never agreed with it because I had this experience in Angola as a peacekeeper. We tried to give incentives to the fighters to give up their arms for training, jobs…but during arms recovery, you needed to see the old, archaic, buried, unserviceable weapons that were brought. And this was exactly what happened in the Niger Delta in the first effort with the Obasanjo administration. I cannot speak authoritatively on the Amnesty programme but even then, you know that while the Amnesty Programme was going on Camp Zero, Tom Polo’s camp, became a big menace in the Niger Delta and had to be invaded, led by Gen. Sarkin Yaki. Money for arms has never worked anywhere. You have to deal with the cause of the insecurity and then you create economic policies that would encourage people to turn in their arms. But when fighting people with ideologies, you have to use force.

Where are these weapons coming from?

Mainly, these weapons come in through the Republic of Niger. You know also that the Republic of Benin is a major one and in those days, as has been well established, the borders through the Lake Chad, right from the history of the Chadian conflict, these have been the three major routes, until the Niger Delta crisis, where the militants were supplied arms massively in exchange for bunkered oil.

You mentioned that the police needs to be trained to deal with these issues. Does that mean that the presidential committee is not relevant?

The presidential committee is only an advisory body. For AIDS, you have an AIDS commission, NACA, established, but for small arms, you have an ad hoc committee that meets on an ad hoc basis. You have NAPTIP, NDLEA for drugs, but for a crucial national security issue that is at the core of every criminality in the country, you have only a presidential committee. We don’t have a clear agency with the necessary laws to tackle this problem. I wonder if this is because of the presence of the omnipresent army that seems to be the only tool in the government toolbox that is applied on every problem. An army of under 200 000!

Is that not an insignificant number considering the size of the population?

In force generation, the number of the armed forces is not the value of the country’s population. The determinant of force generation is first, the threat, then the economy. I hear so many senior military officers go out there and make empty statements about the armed forces being under a million. Even the 200, 000 we have, how well equipped are they? Defence is a very serious business. It is about firepower and mobility; it is not about the number of men. It is how you are able to decisively supress the threat. Where you speak of the value of number is in policing. But in the armed forces, also, when you are fighting an insurgency, it is not just the force that is in consideration. There is an insurgent to force ratio and when you come to that, you will be speaking of 20 to 22 personnel to 1000 people. That is how you generate the force. Those 22 people include the army, the police, the immigration, custom, medical personnel. In some cases the ratio goes up to 25 personnel per 1000 people. And you cover the virtual space with technology, which doesn’t come cheap. But for every 1000 people (including civilians and insurgents) in the northeast, you need to employ 20-22 government agents to secure them.

Earlier you mentioned that insurgents number around 2-300, 000. How did we arrive at this figure and what does this mean for our overstretched troops?

Those are by credible intelligence agencies and this number oscillates between those who have been destroyed and those who have been recruited and we are talking about forces in the Mamman Nur faction and the Shekau faction in the south. Even if you are going to make a calculation of the force structure only by the number of the terrorists of 22-25 to 1000, you can imagine the number of force you require.

So when the government says it has “technically defeated” an insurgency that is still at 2-300,000 strong, doesn’t that contradict what we are saying?

I don’t know of the politics of decimating and “technically defeating” an unconventional army because what unconventional adversaries do is that they are very fluid, they mutate. Was it not recently that they blew up a bridge with 30 people? Or was it not recently that they ambushed even the theatre commander himself? So what insurgents do is that they continue to adapt their tactics and there is no insurgency in history that has been defeated otherwise you won’t have Christianity and Islam today. Because an insurgency is a battle of idea against an establishment that is assumed by the ideologues to be repressive. The idea is in the heart, it continues to evolve. We have seen how Boko Haram has continued to evolve.

If we can’t defeat this insurgency then how can we contain it?

By force but most of all, an insurgency has primarily a political basis so it is by the more enduring political instrument that you can deal with it. You can kill a man but you can never kill an idea. The more you understand it, the better you find ways of dealing with it. You must have heard of the IRA (the Irish Republican Army) they are still there, they still hold their marches and they are provided security by the state and even have members of parliament. So it is about finding how you can transform these ideas.

If we have the political will, do you think we can mop up these illicit small arms and light weapons?

Definitely. If there is a political will and the proper funding, organisation and legislation is done, it is a problem that can be well mitigated. You can’t eliminate it but definitely you can mitigate it.

We have seen the rise of self-help security organisations in various parts of the country. What does that say about the state of security or insecurity in the country?

There is a research by DFID published recently, which says that 75 of security provisioning in the country is done by private individuals and organisations. We are in a reality where we have to give way to devolve policing in Nigeria. I don’t see how a traffic warden controlling traffic in my village in Shendam is a federal policeman. I do not see why my uncle fights with his wife in Shendam and they will invite the federal police to settle the case or if my neighbour’s chicken is missing. I don’t understand that. We say local government chairpersons and governors will use them but what is happening now? State governors are providing arms and ammunition to the federal police, they pay raw cash to the military and the police, even in the northeast. Their governors fund the military to prosecute the war on insurgency. They are chief security officers of the state but don’t have any security apparatus at their disposal. It doesn’t make sense. We have to look at this things from the real practical value and because the federal police is bloated, using some shady figures, that is why you can’t fund them, you can’t train them, but each time there is an election, government house gives federal police money to deploy for elections. We really have to sit down and agree that we need strong legislature, judiciary that can perform oversight functions over the laws and even law enforcement agencies.

With the state governments unable to pay salaries of their civil servants, how do you think they can cope with this added responsibility you are advocating?

Is the Federal Government paying its salaries? We just have this military garrison centralist mentality, because we have all come from a militaristic background. You shouldn’t be able to cap salaries for every state. Every state should decide if it wants its police to carry arms, determine how much they can pay as salaries and so on.