Nigeria Border closure: Mopping a leaking roof

“Now that our people in the rural areas are going back to their farms, and the country has saved huge sums of money which would otherwise have been expended on importing rice using our scarce foreign reserves. We cannot allow smuggling of the product at such alarming proportions to continue”

–President Muhammadu Buhari to his Beninois counterpart, Patrice Talon, on the margins of the Seventh Tokyo International Conference for African Development, in Yokohama, Japan

On August 20, 2019, President Mhammadu Buhari ordered a partial closure of Nigeria’s land borders in order to check smuggling of contrabands into the country. The banned items include rice, secondhand clothing materials and poultry products among others. Opinions are divided among Nigerians on the propriety or otherwise of that action. I have said on several platforms that though the decision is laudable, it is not far-reaching.

It is true that no sane country will allow its market to be flooded with products of doubtful standards and wholesomeness. For so long, Nigeria has been at the receiving end of being converted to dumping ground for all manner of foreign imports, many of which can be produced locally. It is on record that most of the rice and poultry products smuggled into Nigeria from Benin Republic, Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic are either contaminated, expired or unhygienic for human consumption. The rice has been in the silos of the exporting countries for many years and being preserved with chemicals; the poultry products are also preserved with harmful substances such as formalin allegedly used in embalming corpses while some of them are injected with steroids to make them big. Even if these products are good for human consumption, the wider implication is that their being smuggled into the country will kill local production as these foreign goods are sold cheaper than the locally produced ones while people also have mentality of preferring imported products to locally manufactured ones.

I was shocked to learn that Nigeria spends an average of US $22bn (N7.92tn) each year on food imports. Its major food imports include wheat, sugar and fish. Another big import, rice, accounts for about US$1.65bn, or N0.59tn. Most of the country’s rice is imported from Thailand and India. Government’s backward integration programme led to billions of naira being loaned to Nigerian farmers by the Central Bank of Nigeria to encourage local rice production under the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme. Remember the LAKE Rice jointly being produced by Lagos and Kebbi states. Poultry and livestock farmers are also being similarly motivated.  Ironically, in spite of this encouraging move, less than half of the domestic demands are being met by local farmers, thus pushing up demand for foreign imports. This is one of the reasons why smuggling of such products has been very attractive. Demand is very much higher than supply.

Among the benefits of the current border closure is the increased revenue for the Nigerian Customs Service. According to its Comptroller-General, Hameed Ali, the agency collects between N4.7bn and N5.8bn daily since the Federal Government closed the nation’s major land borders. He made the revelation on Wednesday, October 2, 2019 when he appeared before the National Assembly joint committee on finance. Ali equally revealed that “About 10.2m litres of fuel has now been cut down from what we had been assuming to have been consuming. These 10.2m litres of fuel are always going across the border.” On Monday, October 28, 2019, the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, after meeting with President Buhari said Nigerian rice and poultry farmers are now laughing to the banks as all their unsold products have been bought with so much unmet demands due to the border closure. Apart from financial and economic gains, closure of the border has also curtailed the smuggling of small arms and light weapons into the country.

Despite these positive and remarkable achievements, I maintain that it amounts to mopping a leaking roof. How do I mean? Border closure is not far-reaching enough to check smuggling. The front page report of THISDAY of Tuesday, October 22, 2019, said, “Despite the closure of Nigerian land borders by the Federal Government in the last three months, smuggling still persists at the border between Nigeria and Niger Republic.” The newspaper gathered that at the border between Jibia in Katsina State and Niger Republic, smugglers had resorted to the use of illegal routes to ferry in bags of foreign rice, bales of second-hand clothing and other contrabands.

The newspaper went on to say that its investigation revealed that while strict compliance appears to reign at the main border post between the two countries, illegal business still thrived at some bush paths and sundry illegal entry points where unscrupulous operatives, work hand-in-glove with smugglers to smuggle contraband goods into the country. Some of the illegal routes the smugglers used to ferry in the contrabands from Niger Republic to Jibia Local Government Area of Katsina State include Sabon Gari, Dan-Harau, Alele, Makada and Maidabaro roads despite heavy security at the borders.

The smugglers, it was learnt, go through the laborious route of offloading the contrabands a few meters away from the official border security post and use J-5 buses, Gulf 4 and 5 vehicles and motorcycles to ferry the items from their hideouts into Jibia for onward movement to their warehouses in Katsina, Kano, Kaduna, Zamfara, Jigawa states and some other parts of the country.

Recall that the Nigeria Immigration Service, on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, in Abuja, disclosed that Nigeria has over 1,400 illegal border routes.  The then Comptroller-General of the NIS, David Parradang, made the disclosure while addressing the National Conference on Immigration. He said that even though the country had only 84 approved land border control posts designated in the 1980s after the Maitatsine riots, “there are more than 1,400 illegal borders in the country”. What have we done to effectively police these illegal entry points?

On April 25, 2019, the Federal Executive Council presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo approved N52bn for an e-border solution to monitor the country’s borders. The former Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau, announced the approval while briefing State House correspondents. He said the contract would cover 86 border posts and the over 1,400 illegal routes being used for smuggling and other cross-border crimes. The big question is, how much of this princely sum has been released for the work to commence? Can Nigerians be updated on where we are with this e-border project? In as much as we have porous and unpoliced borders, smuggling will continue to thrive. It is therefore imperative for the government to use the period of this border closure to reinforce security at our borders.

Aside from effective surveillance of Nigerian borders, there is a need to court the support of Nigerian border communities. Government needs to incentivise them with good infrastructure and make them feel the impact of good governance so that their buy-n can be got in the fight against smuggling. That is the only way they can serve as whistle-blowers on the smugglers.

Furthermore, all the corrupt elements among Nigerian law enforcement agents at the borders should be weeded out. These economic saboteurs’ renegades and fifth columnists who aid and abet the smugglers in their nefarious activities need to be shown out of the security agencies.   Lastly, there is an urgent need to promote the ease of doing business. Apart from the dumping policy of some countries, the cost of doing business in the country is too prohibitive which then makes Made-in-Nigeria goods not to be competitive in the market. It is wrong for locally produced goods to be more expensive than the imported ones even when they are smuggled into the country. The government should ease the clearing of goods at our seaports, airports and even land borders by reducing the layers of the bureaucratic bottlenecks.