Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom has got no chills.Maybe because he has seen so much action.
He’s urging President Muhammadu Buhari, the grand patron of cattle breeders in Nigeria, to license every responsible Nigerian looking to get AK-47 for self defence against Fulani herders and bandits terrorising Nigeria.
And Ortom is damn serious about it, stating it emphatically in a statement on Wednesday by the governor’s Chief Press Secretary, Terver Akase.
The statement, entitled ‘National Security: Gov Ortom Proposes The Way Forward’, was an excerpt from a paper he presented during a virtual meeting convened by Centre for Values in Leadership, CVL, in collaboration with Nigeria Governors’ Forum, NGF.
“Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom has urged the Federal Government to grant licences to responsible citizens to carry sophisticated weapons such as AK47 to deter criminals from attacking innocent and helpless Nigerians,” the statement read in part.
He said the policy should be backed with a strict legal framework to prevent illegal possession of arms by the citizenry without exception.
As far as he knows this is about the most down-to-earth solution to the insecurity problem across the nation.
“Governments at all levels must come to terms with the fact that insecurity is a real threat to development of the country and be willing to sincerely tackle the menace,” he said.
The US, with the most liberal gun laws on earth, is having problem as the rate of gun violence keeps going up.
But considering the solution from the viewpoint of a chief security officer of a state bedeviled with herdsmen violence, one can understand why Ortom acted the way he did.