The Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has rejected former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s pledge to reopen Nigeria’s land borders if elected president in 2027, insisting the borders are already open and therefore cannot be reopened.
In a statement issued on Saturday, Tunji-Ojo, who oversees the Nigeria Immigration Service, said Nigeria’s borders “are not closed and so cannot be reopened.”
He recalled that the previous administration reopened the Seme, Illela, Maigatari and Mfum borders on December 16, 2020.
Idiroko and Ikom followed for goods and services on April 20, 2022. Under the current administration, the Kamba and Tsamiya borders in Kebbi State were reopened in February 2026, connecting Nigeria to Niger Republic and Benin Republic respectively.
Tunji-Ojo clarified that prolonged restrictions at some Cameroon border crossings, including Banki and Amchidé, were unrelated to the 2019 trade policy.
Those crossings were closed in 2014 due to Boko Haram activity and reopened in 2019, while Fotokol and Gambaru followed in 2021 after joint military and stabilisation efforts involving Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad.
He said treating these separate episodes as one continuous 2019 shutdown misrepresents two distinct issues: trade regulation and counter-insurgency.
The minister acknowledged that not every northern crossing is fully unrestricted. Where banditry or residual insurgent activity continues, tighter controls remain a deliberate security decision, not neglect.
Reopening them prematurely, he argued, would put traders and border communities at greater risk.Modern border management, Tunji-Ojo stressed, is not a simple choice between total closure and unrestricted movement.
It requires balancing security, documentation, customs compliance and controlled trade facilitation.
He urged Atiku to present any new border policy in detail rather than portraying separate trade, security and infrastructure matters as a single failure, adding that “political competition should not become a competition to rewrite recent history.”
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