Checkpoint Politics, Cross-Border Exchanges, and Nigeria’s 2019 Border Closure Policy

Abstract: Aggressive smuggling of agricultural and petroleum products, automobiles, fabrics, and firearms underscores the motivation for Nigeria’s border-closure policy instituted in August 2019. The dominant opinion, particularly that of the official government analysts, assessed the policy as successful, even before thoroughly evaluating its performance. Existing studies on borders and cross-border relations in Africa have focused on colonial cartography, the porosity of African borders, and their consequences for border security. These studies have not adequately engaged border-closure policies to ascertain why they failed. Moreover, border-regulation policies have often ignited dangerous and alarming approaches to penetrate the border and promote illegality. Drawing on interviews, archival documents, institutional reports, newspaper editorials, and secondary sources, this article deploys the notion of checkpoint politics to make sense of the implementation of the closure policy and discusses cross-border exchanges and practices, showing how they contributed to the failure of the Nigerian border-closure policy of 2019.