Dr Kwesi Aning, a security expert at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC), on Thursday said the inability of the Nigeria government to deal with Boko Haram when it started could be cited as the reason the terrorist group had grown so strong.

"Boko Haram did not come out of the blue as it took about 10 years for it to mature to this stage all because we failed to deal with it when it started,” he said.

Dr Aning said this during a four-day workshop on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) organised by the KAIPTC and sponsored by the Japanese government.

He called for effective state control of SALW in order to prevent them from falling into wrong hands and added that kidnapping, piracy, terrorism and armed robbery could not be effective without the use of SALW.

He said he wondered why “we would name a dance Al Qaeda and an armed robbery group Taliban”.

The workshop which attracted about 35 participants from about 10 ECOWAS countries was under the theme "Small Arms and Light Weapons Policy Training on Stockpile Management".

Boko Haram was created in 2002 in Maiduguri, the capital of the north-eastern state of Borno by Islamist cleric Mohammed Yusuf who led a group of radical Islamist youth in the 1990s.

The group aims to establish a fully Islamic state in Nigeria including the implementation of Sharia

The group has carried out a lot of terrorist acts, the most daring one being kidnapping of more than 200 school girls in Chibok, a town in northern Nigeria.