Government sets up arms proliferation committee

Nigeria’s defence minister, Theophilus Danjuma, inaugurated on Tuesday in Abuja a National Committee on the Proliferation and Illicit Trafficking in Small Arms and Light Weapons, news organisations reported. PANA quoted Danjuma as saying the committee was being inaugurated “in the nick of time considering the spate of threats posed to our nascent democracy in the last one year by ethnic/religious armed uprisings in different parts of the country”. The committee’s brief includes tracing the sources of illegal arms, gathering information on the illicit weapons trade in Nigeria and around its borders, recommending measures to deal with the problem and overseeing the implementation of the recommendations, PANA said.