As human beings, it’s normal to lose things sometimes because we cannot always be vigilant. The TV remote grows legs, you can’t find your ATM card when you need to pay for that expensive meal or your phone charger is suddenly nowhere to be found; it happens.
What you don’t expect to go missing is thousands of weapons enough to take over a small country. But that’s exactly what the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) is currently missing.
How the hell did that happen?
A total of 178,459 different types of arms and ammunition belonging to the Force were unaccounted for as of January 2020. 88,078 of them are AK-47 rifles, along with 3,907 other assorted rifles and pistols.
This massive loss was exposed in a report submitted to the National Assembly by the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation (AuGF) in 2021. The audit established that the Force failed to keep appropriate records of firearms and ammunition. The standard practice is the officer in charge of an armoury reports the loss of firearms within three days. This was not happening across many formations of the NPF because since when is standard practice anything more than a suggestion in Nigeria?
For example, a Police Mobile Force (PMF) Squadron in Abuja lost 46 firearms between 2000 and 2019, according to its schedule, yet didn’t report a single one missing.
If you sold laptops and mysteriously lost five of them in one month, chances are high that you would at least tweet about it in frustration. The NPF lost more than 88,000 AK-47 rifles and kept it moving like it’s a normal day at the office.
And when the audit team raised concerns about its discovery, the Police Force failed to respond.
What’s the implication of this?
A gang of armed robbers attacked six banks and a police station and killed more than 30 people in Offa, Kwara state in April 2018. The suspects later confessed that it was a former SARS officer who had supplied them with the AK-47 rifles used for the attack. It’s not difficult to draw a straight line between that officer’s access to illegal arms and the poor record-keeping culture of the NPF.
For a country with a scale of insecurity like Nigeria, missing firearms should raise eyebrows. The easy spread of small arms and ammunition across the country is a major driving force for increasing violence.
Not only are these missing arms going straight into the wrong hands, but they also cost taxpayers money to replace them.
What’s the Nigerian Police doing about this?
The spokesperson of the NPF, Muyiwa Adejobi, told Punch on February 25, 2022 that the Inspector-General of Police, Usman Baba, is looking into the matter. He mentioned that it was unlikely that the number of arms flagged as lost is accurate.
Adejobi said, “What we need to do is to reconcile our report with the one being quoted. We have our records too. I guess there are some arms on loan to various formations. For instance, if a certain number of arms are given to Lagos for special operations, all these movements are always documented but are complex.”
While Adejobi does not dispute that firearms are lost, he believes a reconciliation of records will show the figure is not as high as the audit found. So maybe it’s only, say, 50,000 AK-47 rifles missing, not 88,078?
How long will it take to know for sure? It may take a while for the NPF to set its own records straight. But we advice that no one should hold their breath for an answer.
