Arms Launch

Chairman of the National Commission of Civic Education, Mr Laary Bimi has urged the security agencies and immigration authorities to step up efforts to check the proliferation of small arms in the country to protect its relative internal peace.

Speaking at press briefing in Accra on Sunday prior to the launch of a National Week of Action on Small Arms on Monday, June 2, Mr Bimi also called on the licensing authorities to ensure that only authorised persons handled guns.

Strategies to control the manufacturing of guns should be devised and also guns manufactured should have serial numbers, and be properly registered to make the monitoring of their illegal use very effective, he advised.

Mr Bimi said the proliferation of small arms was one of the causes of human insecurity in the West Africa sub-region, and added that although Ghana was seen as an island of peace, it was still insecure because of the storms of small arms conflicts in neighbouring countries.

That, he said, put the country at risk and added, "we must begin to take steps to prevent the storms of small arms conflict in neighbouring countries erupting in Ghana,"

Security agencies at the country's entry points should be equipped to put a check on possible inflow of small arms he said.

Mr Bimi urged the media, civil society groups and other stakeholders to intensify education on arms and support the week, which would runs from June 2 to 8, on the theme "Illegal Weapons Kill: Act Now.

The Ghana Action Network on Small Arms (GHANSA) has teamed up with the NCCE to organise a series of activities to raise public awareness and to solicit attention of government to step up effort to control the spread of illicit weapons and small arms.

The Week of Action is in response to the call of the International Action Network on Small Arms, of which Ghana is a member.

Activities planned include public fora, radio and television discussion programmes, public lectures and victims' testimonies.

Madam Afi Yakubu, Secretary of the GHANSA, on behalf of General Emmanuel Alexander Erskine, Chairman of the GHANSA, said 80 events had been planned in 30 countries around the world.

Madam Yakubu, commended the destruction of 874 illegal small in 2001, but noted that in spite of the Government's demonstrable willingness to maintain internal state security, small arms were still used to threaten the peace of the country on a daily basis.

"Conflicts and armed banditry are perpetrated by the easy availability of small arms which serve the purposes of only a few individuals.

"It is cheaper to acquire a gun and make your displeasure heard than to cultivate a piece of land to make a descent living... Guns must not be cheaper than bullock ploughs," Madam Yakubu said.

Mr Benjamin Abiemo, a Level 100 Mathematical Sciences student at the University of Ghana, told the conference of an attack from two armed men, who robbed him of his mobile phone and 200,000 cedis.

He said his assailants shot him in the neck at the entrance of the University of Ghana campus, near the Unipetrol Filling Station on May 10, this year.

He was on admission at the 37 Military Hospital for two week.