IRIN Focus on insecurity caused by violent crime

Life suddenly took a traumatic turn for bank manager Vincent Chime on the night of 7 July when a gang of 15 heavily armed robbers invaded his home in Lagos’ Surulere suburb. Chime had always felt secure, behind the heavy fortifications of his compound, from the robberies that are a common occurrence in the city of some 12 million people. High walls, a steel gate topped with electrified barbed wire, doors and windows covered by wrought iron bars were enough to make him feel insulated from burglaries. But the robbers who visited him came well prepared. They brought enough equipment to bore man-sized holes in the wall around the compound and that of the main house, which they then entered. For three hours Chime and other residents of his street were held hostage as their assailants loaded up money, jewelry and any other portable household valuables. By the time they left, shooting triumphantly into the air, three guards and five guard-dogs that had offered resistance were lying dead on the ground. “The police arrived thirty minutes later, of no use to anyone,” Chime told IRIN. One week later, the robbers came back to finish off the job, looting homes they had left out during their first visit. Since then residents of the street have been packing up and leaving. Chime and his family are staying with relatives in a part of the city considered less burglary-prone, while looking for a safer home. “I just realised there was no way we could continue staying in that house. The trauma was unbearable,” Chime said. “Sometimes the children would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, having nightmares that the robbers had come back.” Lagos has always been notorious for violent crime, but the recent upsurge in violent robberies has spared hardly any part of Nigeria, not even Anambra State, where the use of a controversial local vigilante force, known as the Bakassi Boys, was touted to have kept armed robberies in check in the past year. Bandits struck in the southeastern state with a vengeance on 18 July. According to local newspaper reports, a gang of at least 30 attacked the rural town of Awkuzu and shot dead 22 people, apparently in reprisal for the summary killings of suspected robbers by the Bakassi Boys. Various explanations have been offered for the increasing violence. Massive unemployment and underemployment, particularly of youths - including many university graduates - have been identified as one of the root causes. More than a decade of unrelieved economic difficulties which, on the basis of recent inflationary signals, appear to be worsening is another. Yet another factor is the widespread proliferation of small arms in the country. The National Committee on the Proliferation and Illicit Trafficking of Small and Light Weapons, set up by President Olusegun Obasanjo, recently declared that security agents in border areas were ineffective in checking the influx of small weapons into the Nigeria. Group Captain Olabode Olagoke, who heads the Committee, told journalists that security agents in the border areas lacked the logistic support, communication equipment and operational structure needed to monitor the border areas effectively . Over seven million small arms are estimated to be in circulation in West Africa. Committee members believe that those that enter the country fuel its many communal clashes in addition to the armed robberies. “Many of the youths who form the warriors of rival groups in communal clashes are often the same people who resort to robberies when there is a lull in communal clashes,” one official told IRIN. Furthermore, Nigeria’s police force is hamstrung by a shortage of manpower. There is one policeman for every 1,200 people whereas the UN-recommended ratio is 1:400. A decade and half of playing second fiddle to the soldiers under military rulers who preferred to use their men for most security assignments also took its toll on the police. For almost a decade there were no new recruitments nor was new equipment provided. While Obasanjo’s elected government has stepped up efforts to re-equip the police and boost its manpower, morale in the force remains very low. This was illustrated by a recent incident in Lagos, when police equipped with assault rifles and a new Peugeot patrol car fled from the checkpoint they were manning outside the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), on sighting a gang of pistol-toting robbers in a mini-bus. NAN reported on the incident, which guaranteed it wide media coverage, but the general perception is that many such incidents go unreported. Also undermining Nigeria’s anti-crime efforts is a deep-seated suspicion by the public that elements in the security forces are either involved in most of the armed robberies or are collaborating with the robbers. A number of recent incidents tend to bear out these suspicions. Early this year two policemen were sentenced to death by a court in Kogi State, central Nigeria, after they were found guilty of setting up an illegal roadblock, robbing five traders of about five million naira (US $44,646) and torching their bus. Two of the traders survived and provided the clues that led to the policemen’s arrest. Last week, a vigilante group in the northeastern state of Yobe had a shoot-out with a group of “robbers” who had mounted a roadblock at night on a major highway. Two of the “robbers” were killed. They turned out to be policemen attached to a station in the area.