Presidency: ONSA to mop up illegal arms through whistleblower policy

The federal government has initiated plans to extend the whistle-blower policy to the recovery of illegal arms in the country.

In a statement on Sunday, Garba Shehu, the senior special assistant to the president on media and publicity, confirmed that Babagana Munguno, the national security adviser, has begun work on a template for “the discovery and recovery of illegal weapons through a reward system”.

He said the office of national security adviser (ONSA) is adopting the whistle-blowing approach to eradicate mass shooting incidents and remove the harassment of law abiding citizens by holders of illegal weapons.

Shehu said the said the proposed adoption of the policy on illegal weapons followed its success in the recovery of huge amount of “questionable and stolen funds” by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

He also noted that the presidency had started drawing up the rules of a whistle-blower mechanism “to throw a spotlight on the regime of gun ownership and control as a bold move to prevent and eradicate illegal ownership of small arms and light weapons in the country”.

“In the last few days, we had discussed the efforts the administration is making to strengthen the whistle-blower mechanism in the Ministry of Finance, which to date has proved to be very effective in bringing the attention of the government to stolen assets and unexplained wealth”, he said.

“The ONSA initiative may be an independent line of inquiry or in active collaboration with what the government is doing in Finance. This will be a sort of searchlight on weapons ownership in the country.

“Whatever form or shape it takes, the administration wants to take a tough line to curtail the large number of illegal weapons in circulation used in intra and inter-communal conflicts”.

The presidential spokesman said this would be a sort of searchlight on weapons ownership in the country and that the aim was to disarm communities “especially those with proclivity to violence”.

He further disclosed that the ONSA had already inaugurated a committee saddled with the responsibility of the recovery of small arms and light weapons in the country

Earlier this year, the federal government introduced the whistle-blower policy to help in the recovery of looted funds.

So far, the EFCC has through the policy made several discoveries of huge sums of money, the most recent being the N2 billion allegedly traced to Kantigi Liman, a 2015 governorship aspirant of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Niger state.