Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has pledged to reopen Nigeria’s land borders and expand port infrastructure in the South if elected president in 2027.
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) candidate, addressing supporters in a video shared online on Friday by ADC chieftain Dele Momodu, linked the two pledges to a single goal: easing the flow of goods across the country and reviving trade-dependent livelihoods, especially in the North and North-East.
On the borders, Atiku blamed the 2019 closure for gutting transborder trade with Nigeria’s northern neighbours and pushing young traders out of business.
‘The Northern states is bordering Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Benin Republic.
‘And you close all those borders. All our young men who are doing trading between these countries, they carry goods across, they do this and that, all what we call transborder trade is a legitimate business,’ Atiku said.
He said traders who once ran businesses worth millions of naira, and employed others, had been driven into bankruptcy and unemployment.
‘All the upcoming young men and women who used to have a capital of 10 million, 20 million, and they were employing two, three other people, and then all of them went bankrupt and unemployed. How can there be security?’ he asked.
‘So I said I am going to reopen the borders and I will,’ he added.
On ports, Atiku said he had already begun addressing the issue by holding talks with European shippers on developing ports in the South and South-East.
‘During the last campaign, I went across to Europe to discuss with shippers and ship development companies how we can together develop South and South-Eastern ports so that there is balance as far as importation of goods and transportation of goods are concerned,’ he said.
He illustrated the current cost of that imbalance with his own business, a factory in Yola, Adamawa State, that relies on containers shipped from Lagos.
‘So when, if I drop my container in Calabar or in Uyo or in Port Harcourt, it will just take me 24 hours to take the container to Yola.
‘But right now, it takes me not less than two months to take my container from Lagos because you have to cross over from South-West, you go to North-East, and then there is even no road,’ Atiku said.
He insisted his proposals were not new ideas but a response to concerns Nigerians had long raised about the cost of moving goods and the underdevelopment of southern ports.
Nigeria’s land border policy has shifted repeatedly since the 2019 shutdown, which the Buhari administration justified as a move to curb smuggling of rice, poultry, petroleum, weapons and drugs while boosting local agriculture.
Four posts – Seme in Lagos State, Illela in Sokoto State, Maigatari in Jigawa State and Mfun in Cross River State – were reopened in December 2020, and the Tinubu government reopened the Tsamiya and Kamba corridors linking Kebbi and Niger Republic in February 2026, alongside Customs Service assurances of tighter anti-smuggling controls.