"As I am here, I check my phone regularly and I know the number of guns that are very close to me here. This is just less than one thousand installations. Within us now, there are over 277 guns around here just because an armoury is close to this place."
The senator representing Ondo South Senatorial District, Jimoh Ibrahim, has said there are over 277 guns within the National Assembly and the Presidential Villa.
Mr Ibrahim disclosed this during the plenary on Wednesday when he was contributing to a motion sponsored by the Senate Chief Whip, Ali Ndume, on the recent bombings in Gwoza town of Borno State.
The senator explained that he has an application on his mobile phone which can detect the number of guns within his jurisdictions.
He did not, however, mention those bearing the guns.
"I don't want to take much of your time but I will say clearly it costs nothing for the intelligent army to get devices in their phone to know where these notorious criminals live.
"As I am here, I check my phone regularly and I know the number of guns that are very close to me here. This is just less than one thousand installations. Within us now, there are over 277 guns around here just because an armoury is close to this place," he said.
He advised the Nigerian military to adopt the use of technology rather than deploying officers to crime scenes.
"So, what I am saying is, with technology, just like distinguished Senator Ndume had said, to deploy technology rather than using soldiers."
How to track guns with bullets
While Mr Ibrahim was speaking, the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, interrupted him and asked how one could determine whether the detected guns had bullets.
"Do you know out of the 277 guns around you here now, do you know how many of them have bullets inside?" Mr Akpabio asked.
The senator laughed and said there was a probability that half of the guns would be equipped with bullets.
"Mr Senate President, we can actually do a probability, if we have 277 guns close to you within the radius of one kilometre, there is a probability that half of them have bullets and that is dangerous and we need to find out the source of those guns but because I can locate that the armoury close to us and very close to the villa , then I can understand that we are safe," he said.
Conventional war
Mr Ibrahim, a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) urged the military to prioritise the use of technology in tracking criminals and their hideouts.
"I want to say very clearly that the military should stop using unconventional strategies to fight insurgency in Nigeria. There is a distinction between unconventional and conventional strategy. We need to use conventional strategy to fight unconventional war. Boko Haram is an unconventional war.
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"We are all aware of what happened in Kenya. We cannot close our eyes, we need to wake up. So, I will finally suggest to you, Mr Senate President and my distinguished colleagues that this Senate under your leadership must have a closed-door meeting for one day and then use that whole day to discuss security matters.
"Our lives are very important. Living with insecurity cannot be the only way to understand security, we should not get to that.
"How can you be going for a wedding and somebody just put a bomb to attack you and people started dying. It is uncalled for, it is rejected in totality of its formulation."
The proliferation, circulation and trafficking of small arms and light weapons in the country in recent years are alarming. There have been killings in different regions of the country. Civilians and security operatives have been victims of these killings.
