Political Issues
The draconic border closure policy is back again -By Anthony Asiwaju
Our appeal is for the border siege to be lifted without further delay, thus permitting locally produced Nigerian tomatoes traditional access to the periodic markets.
We have seen it before and found that routine police action would hardly work in border areas except at great and unbearable cost, if not to the Federal Government itself, in terms of festering official corruption of the materially insatiable border-enforcement personnel and loss of revenue; at least, to the inevitably adversely affected local border communities.
We saw it in 1984-85, when in his first coming as military head of state in the notorious era of military rule, the then Major- General Muhammadu Buhari used his not too famous draconic style of rule to drive a notorious ultra-nationalism, long ahead of Donald Trump in America, to unilaterally close down all of Nigeria’s international borders against all of our limitrophe neighbours in ECOWAS and ECCAS, including landlocked Niger and Chad to whom Nigeria owed treaty obigations to allow access to its coastal ports for their external trade.
Surprisingly, the criticism of this unpopular decision of the Buhari military regime, contained in our own landmark Inaugural Lecture, titled, Artificial Boundaries,at the University of Lagos on December 12, 1984 in the centenary of the infamous Berlin West African Conference (November 1884/February 1885), fell on the listening ears of the military junta, including the successor regime of Ibrahim Babangida. Following the report of the resultant NIPSS/Kuru-hosted Border Defence and Security Research Project, 1985/1987, in which we were privileged to play some noticeable role, not only were the military authorities persuaded to reopen the borders on March 1, 1986, even while the NIPSS research was just half way through, sequel to invitation to me to present an interim report on my own assigned specially security-sensitive Krake/Seme – Illo sector of the Nigeria-Benin border to a workshop of top-level Nigerian military officers in Ibadan in late February 1986, with General Abdusalami Abubakar, then the GOC in Ibadan in the chair. More importantly, the NIPSS research project also led to the creation of the National Boundary Commission, the operation of which has, since creation by Decree 38 of 17 December 1987, turned around the border management regime away from the police-action approach of the mid-1980s.
But now, in August 2019, the country appears to be drifting back towards the draconic traditions of arbitrary border closure against our regional neighbours, beginning with the Nigeria-Benin to the west, especially in the South-West, our nation’s main gateway into ECOWAS, and the Nigeria-Niger to the north. I hear the closure, which took effect on August 20, is, as was done on April 24, 1984, temporary, a month for now, in the first instance. In 1984, which affected all our borders, remained officially in force till March 1, 1986, even in spite of the change in the military baton in August 1985 when the Buhari regime was booted out by a coup that brought in Babangida.
In 1984-1987, that Nigerian border communities suffered the most ruthlessly has been richly documented in the six-volume memeographed report of the 1985/1987 NIPSS Research Project in Kuru. It included arbitrary seizures, police brutalities of all sorts, unacceptatable tramplings upon people and human rights, generally inhuman treatments, of and on such a scale as to have elicited a passionate plea by Buhari’s kind mother, widely rumoured at that time to be resident more in the Nigérien Daura than in the historic Nigerian ‘parent’ metropolitan Daura in Katsina State.
Within the three days of the ongoing 2019 border closure, the sufferings of the local populations, at least here, in Imeko/Afon Local Government Area of Ogun State, where I live, the strains and stresses have been incalculable and economic losses colossal for predominantly rural and agrarian communities, practising rainfed seasonal cropping, notably fruit tomato, now brazenly obstructed by overzealous, if not sadist men of the Nigeria Customs Service from transporting their products familiar Yoruba periodic weekly markets inside the Nigerian territory, on the grounds that the insensitive state officials were implementing orders from Abuja and also on the absolutely untenable argument that the fresh fruit tomatoes are smuggled products from the Republic of Benin, even in the face that the farms, farmers, the mostly women traders and transporters are well-known Nigeria citizens who are resident in the locality.
This is an area so famous for fresh tomato production that Vegefresh, a well-known Nigerian corporate player in agroindustrial business, specialising in tomato production and industrial processing, and our own O’dua Investment Company have acquired and are currently cleaning more than one thousand hectres of farmland in and around Imeko, all for the purpose of growing and processing tomatoes.
Now, this is a highly perishable product. The glut caused by the Preventive Unit of Nigeria Customs Service is everywhere visible in and around Imeko. The Onimeko and his chiefs, including self as the Balogu, are having sleepless nights in having to steer matters away from a clash between farmers, traders and transporters on the one hand and, the men of Nigeria Customs Service and related border-enforcement agencies, including the Police, Immigration, Port Health, Quarantine, SSS, NDLEA, etc, on the other hand.
Our appeal is for the border siege to
