Africa's Missing Billions - Oxfam International

combatants and have brought their weapons primarily from theCentral African Republic, Chad, and Nigeria. 92 In Nigeria, armedcriminals and secret cultists in Lagos, 93 and armed gangs in theDelta, 94 have stocks of sophisticated small arms, includingKalashnikovs.Where are these weapons manufactured?Weapons made in Africa are rarely used in African conflicts. Arespondent to our survey of disarmament programmes, from UNDPin Sudan, said ‘I have not seen any African-manufactured weapons’ 95 –and this response is typical of African arms specialists and fieldworkers.While small arms and their components are produced in a number ofAfrican countries, the scale of this production is small, both incomparison with the number of weapons produced in the rest of theworld and with the number of small arms used in Africa. Small armsand their components are produced by 22 companies in South Africa,seven in Egypt, and one in Nigeria, while Uganda has one facility forreconditioning arms. 96 It is worth noting, however, that even thisAfrican production depends mostly on technology and licences fromoutside the continent. There is also skilled craft production in somecountries (for example, Ghana and Nigeria) of weapons that appearto be used primarily in armed crime, rather than armed conflict.To get a picture of the scale of African purchases of small arms, welooked at the UN COMTRADE database. 97 This revealed that, of$59.2m-worth of small arms imports to African countries in 2005,$58.5m, or 99 per cent, came from outside Africa and only one percent from African countries. 98 This is only an estimate of statesanctionedtrade, but it shows that the vast majority of Africanweapons are imported from outside the continent.Looking more specifically at Kalashnikovs, most producers arelocated outside Africa, in at least 13 countries. 99 Currently Egypt andSouth Africa are the only African countries that produce Kalashnikovderivatives (respectively, the Misr, 100 a high-quality copy, and theVektor R4 and R5, more distant relatives), although Nigeriaannounced plans in 2006 to produce and export its own version, theOBJ006. 101 We believe that Misr weapons are in service in CentralAfrica and that the R4 is in service in Zimbabwe, although it does notappear that Egypt or South Africa are exporting significant numbersof these weapons in Africa or elsewhere. 10220Africa’s missing billions, IANSA, Oxfam, and Saferworld, October2007