NCMM to employ 600 security personnel to monitor heritage sites

Abdalah Usman, Director-General, National Commission for Museum and Monuments (NCMM), has said that the commission will employ 600 security personnel and craftsmen to monitor the nation’s heritage sites. Usman said that the commission was only waiting for the release of funds for it to commence recruitment.

He said that a special unit to handle issues relating to illicit trafficking, reparation and restitution of art works would soon be set up in the commission.

The director-general said he was worried at the incessant disappearance of the nation’s art works and called on the security agencies to assist in protecting them.

Usman who asked rhetorically how many of the nation’s objects left the shore of Nigeria, said, ``the pertinent question to ask now will be how did these objects get to France and other European countries in the first place?''

The French Government on January 29, returned to Nigeria five terracotta sculptures of Nok origin, stolen in 2008 by a Frenchman.

Mr Jacques Champagne, the French Ambassador to Nigeria has said that the return of the artifacts was in keeping with the international law on Intellectual Property.

Champagne said that the exercise was in tune with the French policy on illegal import of cultural goods.

Usman, however, said that there were still other artifacts taken from Nigeria, such as the Benin works of Arts in 1897 by the British Government
during the colonial period, and by some Western anthropologists.

The commission’s boss said that another wave was in the 1960 and 1970 when the civil war provoked large exodus of artifacts through borders with neighbouring countries.

He said that crimes like the ``illegal excavation and looting of heritage, archeological sites and museums by unscrupulous Nigerian and their foreign collaborators'' were bad for the country.

Usman, however, said that the problem of looting the heritage and archeological sites and museum was an age long and worldwide problem.

He said that the Nigeria problem reached an epidemic proportion in the 1990s, when Nok and North Western Nigeria’s archeological sites were ``invaded and ripped off''.

The director-general, however, said that no theft of antiquities in the commission’s museum had been recorded from the collection of the National Museum since 1990.

He said that the approach adopted by the commission had drastically reduced the looting of archeological sites by illegal diggers.

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