Border closure: Nigeria gets tough with ECOWAS, bans repackaged imported goods

PUNCH Nigeria. Tuesday, November 5, 2019
By Adelani Adepegba, Abuja

The Federal Government has listed five conditions for reopening of the country's land borders for
goods importation from neighbouring countries.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama

As one of the conditions, the Federal Government said Nigeria would not accept imported goods that were repackaged by neigbouring countries and brought to Nigeria.

It said the conditions which would be presented to Benin and Niger Republic in two weeks, must be met before the Nigerian land borders would be re-opened.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, disclosed this during the meeting of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Temporary Partial Closure of Land Borders in Abuja on Monday.

He insisted that neighbouring countries must respect the Economic Community of West African States' 'rules of origin' if they must bring goods into the country.

The preconditions for both goods and humans coming into the country, however, applied to all ECOWAS member states.

Onyeama said that goods imported for the Nigerian market must be escorted directly from the port of member states to the nation's land borders.

Also at the meeting, the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs, Col. Hamid Ali (retd), said the January 31, 2020 date for re-opening of the borders was not sacrosanct.

Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, was also in attendance at the meeting which held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters, Abuja.

Explaining the conditions, the foreign affairs minister said Nigeria would no longer tolerate repackaging of goods coming into the country.

He said that any goods imported from ECOWAS member states must have the 30 per cent local input in line with the value addition percentage under the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme.


These conditions, the minister said, would be presented to Benin and Niger Republic at a tripartite meeting scheduled for next two weeks in Nigeria.

He also said that the only travel document allowed for anybody coming into the country through the land borders is the passports, stressing that the country would not accept any other documents such as the identity card.

Onyeama said, "So we (Nigeria committee) met to look at the situation and we have agreed on a set of conditions. Now, these conditions are as follows:

Igbo Scare: Southern Cameroon Hate For The Igbo Led To Secession From Nigeria In 1961

By PROF. IHECHUKWU MADUBUIKE

Igbo Scare: Southern Cameroon Hate For The Igbo Led To Secession From Nigeria In 1961 |RN
THE so-called Igbo “scare” in the British

Cameroons between 1945 and 1961 allegedly led the southern part of the British mandate to opt to leave the federation of Nigeria on the 11th of February 1961. The fear of Igbo domination in all the sectors of social and political life in the former German and British territory was given as a major factor. Kumba, Mamfe, Bamenda, Tiko and Victoria had a large number of NdiIgbo who dominated the economy. This led to local resentments, which politicians like Dr E.M.L.Endeley, Chief Manga Williams and J.N.Foncha exploited for selfish interests.
Stereotyping the Igbo did not change the natural disposition of the latter to hard work, aggressiveness, showiness and ethnic pride—all of which may be interpreted as the Igbo hubris, which in literary parlance is a tragic flaw. Yet local resentment did not stop Igbo migration to Cameroons. The Igbo helped to build the Nigerian-Cameroonian Highway. They became petty and full time traders, engaged in farming, sometimes dispossessing original land owners of their lands through legitimate purchases, and held sway in the plantations.

Because of their education, NdiIgbo became dominant in government services and commerce, especially with the departure of the Germans in 1939. Menial jobs were the reserve of the less educated Cameroonians. There were monopolies like the United African Company and John Holt, all owned by the British. Yet the Igbo, not the British, were accused of marginalizing the Cameroonians.

The Igbo, they cried out, controlled the local administration and made it impossible for locals to occupy high government posts. They had a point but the Igbo did not ask them to be laid back and not to go to school. A British Resident administrative officer in Cameroon also accused the Igbo of injustice and, in his own words, as behaving as” if they were a law unto themselves and not wont to recognize ‘local authority”(See Resident, Cameroon Province, Buea, to Secretary, Eastern Provinces, Enugu, 29 June, 1948).
Such reports did not reduce tension; rather the emerging Cameroonian business and political elite fuelled it to advance their political agitations and encouraged many other unproven allegations against the Igbo. Unsubstantiated Igbo misdemeanor, too numerous to bother the reader with here, occupied the social and political space in the late 1940 Southern Cameroons. The Buea Native Authority demanded the expulsion of the Igbo in 1948 accusing them of dominating the plantations, especially.

Earlier, the Bakweri Native Authority had specifically issued the following orders:
1. Nobody is allowed to sell his or her house to an Ibo; neither must anybody give his or her house for rentage to an Ibo.
2. No farmland must be sold to an Ibo or rented to an Ibo
3. Nobody must allow an Ibo to enter any native farm or forest for purpose of finding sticks for building or for any other purpose.
4. House or farm already sold to any Ibo man shall be purchased by native Authority who will afterwards resell same to some suitable person.
5. Nobody shall trade with Ibos for anything of value or not.
6. All landlords must ask their Igbo tenants to quit before 15 March 1948.
7. No Cameroon woman is allowed to communicate with the Igbos in any form
8. Anybody disobeying those rules shall be liable to a fine of £5 or five months imprisonment.
9. Any Ibo native disobeying Rule (3) above will be liable to prosecuting in the Native Court.
10. All Ibo Government officials are exempted from Rule (5) above.
(Cf: Bakweri, N.A. Buea to Senior D.O, Victoria, 21 Feb.1948.).

It is believed that Chief Manga Williams and Dr Endeley, two parliamentarians in the Eastern House of Assembly, were behind these anti Igbo laws.

The crackdown on Southern Cameroonians

~ Tribune Nigeria. Thursday, October 12, 2017.

THE axiom that freedom is never willingly given by the oppressor but must be demanded by the oppressed cannot be more apt in dissecting the current crackdown on “dissident” elements in Southern Cameroon. Just like the unsavoury events that followed the independence votes in Kurdistan and Catalonia, Southern Cameroon was a theatre of anguish penultimate week. On October 1, the day some separatist elements in the region sought to symbolically regain their independence from the Republic of Cameroon, the Paul Biya-led government unveiled the state apparatus to crush any dissent. The symbolic declaration of independence was made on social media by one Sisiku Ayuk, the “president” of Ambazonia.

Early this year, the Biya government cut off internet access in the region for three months. It did not even bother to adopt the option of counter narratives to whatever the “separatists” were saying. It announced a temporary restriction on travel and public meetings across the South-West Region. This was after imposing a curfew in the neighbouring North-West Region. Only a fifth of Cameroon’s 22 million people are English-speaking, and the government has always sought to suppress this minority. In 1961, the former British entity, Southern Cameroons, united with Cameroon after its independence from France in 1960. At the inception of the union, the federalist system was adopted, but things were to change in 1974 when a patently fraudulent referendum stage-managed by the centralist government in Yaounde imposed the establishment of the Republic of Cameroon.


The assimilation process, a feature of colonial rule, was adopted by the Yaounde government, along with disparities in many parts of the country’s national life: the distribution and control of oil wealth, education and the judicial system. Believing that the federal arrangement, which would allow them considerable power over their own destiny is the way forward for a united and prosperous Cameroon, the Southern Cameroonians have always staged protests, with a much more hard-line section embracing violent rhetoric and calling for outright secession from the country and the formation of a dream country, Ambazonia. But the central government has never pretended to be enamoured of the federalist proposal, let alone secession. On September 22, as thousands of “Ambazonians” took to the streets in the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, soldiers reportedly shot at least eight people dead in the restive Anglophone belt, notably Buea in the South-West and Bamenda, the main town in the North-West. Thereafter, teachers and lawyers hit the streets in protest over the use of French in Anglophone schools and courts. This soon mutated into an outright demand for Ambazonia.