By Atilade Atoyebi
On August 16, it was widely reported that lorry loads of the dreaded and banned drugs—tramadol and codeine were seized in Lagos. How did the lorries enter Lagos? We may ask the same question about the North. How do such consignments enter Kano despite the so-called vigilance of all the military and paramilitary agencies on the border?
The incident in Lagos must have triggered the closure of Nigeria’s border with Bene Republic. However the measure has spread to the country’s borders with her other neighbours—Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
At the time of writing this post, the borders remain closed. President Muhammadu Buhari, a man of not too many words, applauded the shutdown. He met the organized private sector last week and responded to one of their requests that the borders be reopened by drawing their attention to his impression that the closure was yielding the desired results.
Buhari has been concerned over the volume of rice produced in foreign countries, exported into neighbouring countries and transported virtually wholesomely to Nigeria through the porous borders. Nigeria’s President wants to turn his country to a rice producing and possibly exporting nation and he has put policies in place to achieve those objectives. His multi-billion Naira Anchor Borrowers Scheme for rice production is the high point of such policies. State Governments and private companies are buying into the policy and the results are showing in the markets where bags of rice produced in Nigeria are being sold in an unprecedented quantity.
The rice production policies are however being stifled by unabated smuggling of the commodity into Nigeria. As it has been found out, rice smugglers believe that they can always flood the country with imported rice because the security personnel at the border can always be compromised.
It is however not just rice that is the problem. Frozen chicken and turkey parts, the importation of which had been banned in Nigeria for ages are readily available in the open and supermarkets. It is not a big deal. Prices of those items have gone up, turning them into delicacies now. The reason is that some are still trickling in through the uncountable number of bush paths across the borders.
Nigeria’s neighbours depend on the country for her petroleum products. However the problem is that the process of getting bulk of their needs is through what people have described as smuggling, counter trading, parallel trading and informal trading. Nigeria does not refine crude oil. It imports which is an age long shame. The country pays the subsidies attendant to the importation of the products. Meanwhile, part of the allocations to in-country petroleum products dealers ends up getting as far as to Mali and Mauritania through the trading methods mentioned above. Nigeria pays the subsidy, her neighbours freely enjoy it. Since the border closure, authorities at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation have been rolling out figures of daily demand for petrol for instance. They are saying that tanker loads of the product have reduced by about one-third daily since the border closure. That revelation must be instructive to the Nigerian government.
The illegal cross border trading is a booming business. The high and the low are involved in it. Seme border between Nigeria and Bene Republic is known as the super highway of smuggling according to an online media and that may be a correct description going by the volume of illegal trading activities going on at the border crossing.
Buhari’s counterparts in the West Africa sub-region are asking Nigeria to soft pedal and re-open the borders. The Nigerian leader is asking them to put in place at their own end necessary measures to curtail the activities of smugglers in their domain. He is apparently locking in their counterparts in Nigeria.
Economic experts as well as labour unions are wondering what has become of the protocol of the West African Economic Community, ECOWAS that proclaims free movement of people and goods across the borders of the 15 countries in the Community. Some of them are even wondering why Nigeria would act against the spirit of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement that the President ‘belatedly’ signed on behalf of his country.
Nobody knows how the current situation will end. It is conceivable that a taciturn Buhari may not give in easily, at least without an assurance from Nigeria’s neighbours that it will not be business as usual again. Hopefully, he will rein in the pot-bellied Nigerian customs, immigration, police and military officers who are supposed to be manning the borders but have indulged themselves in taking care of what is in it for them.
