'We must pay attention to proliferation of small arms' – Akufo-Addo

The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, wants the country’s security agencies to pay more attention to the manufacturing and proliferation of small arms.

He said his administration will empower the National Commission on Small Arms and Light Weapons to monitor the activities of gun manufacturers to ensure that guns do not land in wrong hands.

Speaking at a meeting with the Board of the National Commission on Small Arms and Light Weapons at the Jubilee House, President Akufo-Addo said more attention needed to be paid to the security risk of local small arms.

“The domestic facilities for manufacturing arms are not very sophisticated but they exist. They are part of the security architecture of our country.”

“We don’t seem to have enough focus on them, and the measures that we need to take to control their proliferation and their existence, and the manner in which they work and produce,” the President said.

Ninety percent of crime scene arms are known to be locally manufactured, according to the Interior Minister.

“We are reliably informed that locally made weapons form about ninety percent of guns used in armed robbery in Ghana. Sadly, efforts by all previous governments to introduce an alternative source of livelihood to the manufacturers have not yielded the required results. The strategy of amnesty for those with unregistered arms to have them registered made very little impact,” Ambrose Dery said in 2017.

The Defense and Interior Committee of Parliament previously urged the Interior Ministry to use technology to track firearms in the country.

“We need to digitize the old manual way of retrieving and filing records. We need to computerize the system so that we can track all the arms in the system,” the Vice-Chair of the Committee, Collins Owusu Amankwah advised.