Nigeria has opened four of its land borders namely Seme, Illela, Maigatari, and Mfun a year after closure, a statement from Nigeria’s Presidency said.
The land borders were closed to goods in August 2019, with a partial opening for people prompted by the coronavirus pandemic throughout 2020.
In a recent meeting with the ruling APC party chieftains, President Buhari had promised the border would be opened ‘as soon as possible’.
Presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu said that the ‘message had sunk in’ to neighbouring countries used as a base for smuggling into Nigeria.
Nigeria closed its border against its neighbours almost immediately after it signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the closures of Nigeria’s borders to prevent smuggling of rice and other products, in attempts to ensure food self-sufficiency back in August 2019.
Rising food prices
Since then food prices have soared, reaching an all-time high of 18.3%, while inflation in the country of the more than 200 million people rose to a three-year high of 14.9%, according to data from the country’s data agency, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
“Food inflation is a good example of the outcome of the border closure, considering that 2020 saw 22 states in the country experience flooding, especially the food-producing areas”, says Samuel Segun, an analyst at SMB Intelligence.
He also notes the growing insecurity that has led to attacks on farmers. “So, the government choosing to ban the importation of food items under the guise of border closure hasn’t translated into higher production of food by farmers,” he said.
While analysts say they do not see the government having “the imagination to take its hands off protectionism completely,” given that the “economic policies we are seeing aren’t so different from what was obtainable in the 80s under Buhari’s previous term,”
According to Segun, they do see the government easing control on trade with its neighbours in the coming year, partly because its protectionism stance on trade in the past 16 months has failed, and partly because the government just recently ratified the AfCTA it reluctantly signed on 7 July 2020.
Nigeria ratified Africa’s historic free trade agreement will now come into effect on 1 January 2021, last month, paving way for a potential re-opening of its borders.
The ratification has been hailed as helping to inch the continent of more than a billion people towards becoming the world’s largest free trade area since the World Trade Organization.
There were several forces nudging Nigeria in this direction, and shaping international trade dynamics of Africa’s biggest economy in 2021, according to Ebehi Iyoha, at the Economics Department at Vanderbilt University.
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