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Africa: Extortion at land borders obstacles to seamless travel on the West Coast

by Atqnews
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With about 280 million people, 40 airports, 15 countries, 10 per cent of the total travel in Africa happens in West Africa but out of the 5 per cent of global tourism that comes to Africa, West Africa has zero percentage because of the constraints to seamless travel within the sub-region.

Contributing to the hassles faced by travellers in West Africa are chiefly the activities of shady immigration, customs, and some other para-military agency officials at the border posts who resort to extorting bus companies and travellers.

And unless the Nigerian, Beninese, Togolese, Ghanaian governments and others take drastic steps to stem the practice, the sub-region will continue to miss out on the gains of tourism.

On these routes, a six-hour journey can take more than 10 hours, no thanks to the unnecessary checks carried out by border agencies.

What has happened to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) protocol on seamless travel within the region?

In as much as the borders need to be secured to check drug trafficking, trafficking in persons, and infiltration by criminals, it must not be to the detriment of genuine travellers.
This problem is however worse on the Nigerian border where there are over 10 extortion stops manned by Immigration, Customs and NDLEA officials.

At the Ghana border, the facilitation is faster and more transparent. The Nigerian situation is however replicated at the Seme and Togo borders.

At these borders, travellers are forced to pay for using their international passports on the route for the first time. Here, international passports that have been used several times are regarded as virgin passports when used to cross the land border for the first time despite visas and arrival and departure stamps on them at airports.

This is one of the loopholes the immigration officials have created to extort money from travellers within the sub-region. One wonders if the proceeds from such practices are remitted to the government coffers or they end up in the pockets of immigration operatives.

At the Seme border, the major road was completed many years ago but it is yet to be open for vehicular traffic. What the Beninese immigration officials do is divert vehicles to a certain place on one of the worst adjoining roads. This is where they have extortion offices and feed fat from illegal tolls.

Little wonder the borders are well policed because of the money immigration, customs and other government agency officials make from motorists while illegal routes around the borders are unmanned thereby giving smugglers and some other criminals the leeway to perpetrate their nefarious activities.

At the Nigerian border, customs officials would waste your time in the guise of complying with the federal government’s directive to check travellers and ensure they declare excess cash they have on them.

This is used as a gambit to extort money from bus companies which do not want to be delayed unnecessarily and probably because of passengers who may be agitating to get to their destination on time.

In some situations where the driver refuses to part with money, the officials will order the luggage to be offloaded and searched one after the other to teach him a lesson so that he will cooperate next time.

The officials know that by doing this, it will delay the passengers who will have no choice than to force the driver to ‘settle’ the officials so that they will not be unnecessarily delayed.

Here, the federal government’s Ease of Doing business is obeyed in breach as what is going on there can be best described as ease of killing business and making hassles-free travel within the region impossible.

In one incident, Nigerian immigration officials asked Nigerian travel journalists who were returning from a conference in Ghana to produce their yellow cards at the Seme border.
It was a terrible experience. Even when the immigration official officials learnt that the ABC Transport bus was chartered for the journalists, they boasted they don’t care for whatever is written about them in the papers is not their business.

They will boldly say to you that President Buhari would do the same if he was deployed to the border, after all man must survive.

They always find one way or the other to collect money from bus companies even when there is no reason for that and if the agreed amount is not paid, everybody is delayed till the driver complies.

The federal government must do something to curtail this ugly trend and impress it on other countries that have borders with Nigeria to also do so.

The government must liaise with the governments of the other countries to check low level corruption perpetrated by para-military agency operatives at the land borders.
The officials are not the solution to the problems at the borders, but are the problem themselves.

By Franklin Ihejirika
Source: nigerianfranknews.com

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