Congratulations Nigeria: “Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari has approved the reopening of four additional land borders, three years after they were closed. The approval was announced through a circular signed by El Edorhe, deputy comptroller-general of Nigerian Custom Service (NCS), on behalf of his principal.” I never supported that land border closure (if it is broken, fix it!) because the bad actors causing troubles in Nigeria NEVER have to use them. A vast domain of the national border is porous, meaning that closing the few legal borders could not have changed any trajectory on handling insecurity.
But the land border closure was significantly impactful in many other ways. First, before the land border closure, banditry was not an issue. Of course, Boko Haram was there. But with the land border closure, we truncated decades, if not centuries, of trade routes, across the nation, distorting commerce at scale. The implication is massive: poverty rose.
From my non-scientific data, I posit that EVERY community in Nigeria was severely affected. How? Merchants lost their businesses and that affected trade in communities, and most rural areas. As that happened, poverty rose. Most small manufacturers who serve neighbouring markets folded. As those entities struggled, the ripple effect, created a monster that is called “banditry” now, which rose out of penchant for economic survival before it metamorphosed into pure criminality.
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The borders are now open; it would be nice if the government can publish a white paper on what was achieved. Without one, I will say that it was a big OWN-GOAL to the Nigerian people.
Headline inflation as of March 2022 is at 15.92 percent year-on-year, according to data published by Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Though there is a little decline compared to the 18.17 percent recorded in the same period last year, the inflation, which was compounded by covid-induced economic strains, means that the Nigerian hunger crisis is far from over.
Over 100 million Nigerians faced food insecurity as of the end of 2020. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in its 2021 report, put the number of moderately or severely food insecure people in Nigeria at 116 million people, a 75 percent increase from the 66.1 million people recorded in 2016. FAO said that about 19.4 million Nigerians will face food insecurity between June and August 2022.
Nigeria Reopens 4 Additional Borders – But What Did the Closure Achieve?
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