Border closure failed to achieve objectives Prof Asiwaju (2)
On
Read the first part of this interview
HERE; it focused on the management of the nation’s borders. In this concluding part, Profesor Asiwaju insists that the unilateral border closure was completely counterproductive.
By Yinka Kolawole
IN Imeko, my own equivalent of Buhari’s Daura, the local business community whose operators have their filling stations located within less than 20 kilometres of the border, and Ilara where existing petrol stations had mushroomed over the years, have speedily found their way round the problem and have flourished and prospered by investing in putting up new and reasonably profitable filling stations along the Imeko – Abeokuta autoroute, on locations safely more than the 20-kilometre spatial limit from the border.
Created untold sufferings for border communities
Anthony Asiwaju, Professor Emeritus, University of Lagos and a leading authority on borders lives along the Nigerian-Benin Republic border. He spoke to Vanguard on issues around Nigeria’s border management against the backdrop of the closure and recent re-opening of the nation’s land borders. Excerpts
By Yinka Kolawole
How effective is Nigeria’s border policing and management mechanism?
There is, perhaps, no better pointer to the abysmal failure of Nigeria’s border policing and management mechanism than the recent candid confession by President Muhammadu Buhari, as reported in the media on Monday, 22 December, wherein he was correctly described as having given up and ‘handed over Nigeria’s border’s to God’.