Kaduna State Governor, Senator Uba Sani, has advocated for the review of the firearms law in Nigeria as a means of tackling the lingering security crisis in the country.
The Governor, who disclosed this in a chat on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, said about 200 million firearms are presently in circulation in the country.
According to the governor, the proliferation of firearms in Nigeria was responsible for the rising insecurity bedeviling the nation at the moment.
The former lawmaker stated that when he was in the Senate, he made moves to amend the Firearms Act “because it is obsolete. The last time the Firearms Act was amended in Nigeria was over 30 years ago”.
Governor Sani said the firearms act in Nigeria does not align with the global best practices.
According to him, Nigeria is the only country “where you can be arrested with illegal firearms and can be taken to court and you can be released based on some charges and not imprisonment. You can pay a fine of about 50,000 naira and you can go home.”
“That is why I started emphasising, firearms control, when the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Africa, UNREC, tabled the report when I was in the senate, that about 200 million illegal firearms are in circulation in Nigeria, out of the 250 million in circulation in West Africa,” Sani said.
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