Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, has issued a stark warning over the country’s deepening vulnerability to global insecurity, revealing that it is home to 40 per cent of the estimated 500 million illegal small arms and light weapons circulating in West Africa.
Delivering a lecture in Ibadan, Oyo State, on Thursday, Gen Musa said these illicit weapons—largely trafficked from conflict zones across the Sahel and North Africa—are fuelling terrorism, banditry and ethnic violence, particularly in the country’s northern regions.
Speaking at the second Distinguished Personality Lecture hosted by the TETFund Centre of Excellence in Security Management at the University of Ibadan’s Trenchard Hall, Musa described Nigeria’s internal security woes as part of a wider global crisis of fragility.
“Over 500 million illicit small arms and light weapons are circulating in West Africa, and an estimated 40 per cent of these weapons end up in Nigeria,” he said. “These weapons, often smuggled from conflict zones in the Sahel and North Africa, have empowered terrorists, bandits, and ethnic militias, escalating violence in Nigeria’s northern regions.”
The defence chief warned that Nigeria’s porous borders and the weakening of governance structures in rural areas have made the country a prime target for transnational threats, with wider implications for regional and global peace.
