How to secure our borders

The porous nature of Nigeria’s borders has become a cog in the wheel of the fight against insecurity in the nation. With the size of 923,768 square kilometres, 910,768 sq km on land and 13,000 sq km in water, a recent study reported that there are 1,400 illegal, uncontrolled and unregulated routes into Nigeria, as against the 84 controlled entry points.

This make it easier for all manner of goods including weapons and illicit drugs to be smuggled into the country and unregulated, and all manner of persons including criminals to sneak into Nigeria.

However, the agencies saddled with the responsibility of controlling the movements of goods and persons across the borders - Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) - are grossly lacking capacity to efficiently man the borders.

The insufficient human and material resources as well as the use of old modem techniques have remained militating factors in border control and management.

Therefore, there is need to increase the number of personnel of the NCS and NIS. There is also a need for adequate training and retraining to build their capacity especially on the modern techniques of border control and management.

The government also needs to improve on their welfare by sufficient remuneration, special housing scheme, good health care facilities and others. Equipment and machineries also need to be provided sufficiently as well as deployment of modern technology such GPS and cameras to monitor activities at the borders.

Another aspect of border control and management is the involvement of the border communities. The communities at the borders are suffering from long time neglect from state and federal governments. This has made them ready tools for smugglers and other trans-border criminals.

The youth in our border communities consider smuggling as their only means of livelihood. As a result, they become aggressive and hostile towards the operatives of the border control agencies. They seize the slightest opportunity to wreak havoc on the government agencies working at the borders. Therefore, government should consider developing these communities, provide alternative means of livelihood to the youth and engage in vigorous orientation and sensitization programmes to enlighten the them on the dangers of these trans-border crimes. This can be achieved through the Border Communities Development Commission.

To successfully stop the plethora of security issues bedevilling the Nigerian Nation, government needs to have full control of it’s borders.

Usman Aliyu Elnafaty, Fadamar Jaji Bauchi