Opinion Piece

Across the world, the governance of borders has become an increasingly contested site of policy innovation and political failure. Since the end of the Cold War, and in the wake of the renewed urgency of security shifts following the 11 September 2001 attacks, states have progressively reoriented their border policies towards securitisation, with an increasing emphasis on surveillance, enforcement and biometric systems as key tools of control. Yet, as Paasi (2009) and Newman (2006) have noted, such investments have not always been matched by a corresponding interest in the complex social, economic, and political roles that borders play. Borders create and constrain livelihoods; they structure and fracture kinship; they facilitate and criminalise trade. In the Global South, in particular, the security logic that informs most border policies has resulted in governance structures ill-equipped to address the complexity of the spaces they claim to govern. The conceptual outcome has been a long-standing gap between the intended and the actual needs of border zones.

In West Africa, these tensions take on particular salience. The region’s colonial history produced borders drawn with little regard for pre-existing communities, trade networks, and ethnolinguistic identities, and cross-border movement has long been the norm rather than an exception (Okumu, 2011). Acknowledging this structural reality, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) designed protocols on the free movement of persons and goods to regulate borders through integration rather than restriction. However, these structures have failed to keep pace with security threats posed by transnational armed groups spanning the Sahel, especially those linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger from ECOWAS in 2023 and 2024, and their establishment of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), have further destabilised the regional governance architecture by removing three of the most security-critical states from shared institutional frameworks at precisely the moment when coordinated border governance is most urgently needed. In this increasingly challenging regional environment, Nigeria’s own weaknesses in border governance have become more significant.

In August 2019, the Nigerian government, under former President Muhammadu Buhari, ordered the closure of its land borders. The announcement was framed primarily as a response to trade and smuggling. Authorities cited the porous movement of rice, arms, and petroleum products as justification for a sweeping shutdown that lasted over a year. Yet the closure quickly revealed something more fundamental: Nigeria has long treated its borders as administrative edges to be policed rather than as dynamic policy spaces to be governed. The costs of that framing have compounded considerably over time.

Scholars have long noted that border governance, understood as the deliberate and coordinated management of the political, security, economic, and social dimensions of border zones, is not a niche concern for immigration and customs officials (Newman, 2006; Okumu, 2011). It is a central pillar of a state’s internal security architecture. In Nigeria, the insecurity spreading across the northwest, northeast and middle belt does not stop at state boundaries, nor does it respect the logic of single-agency security responses. Understanding borders as policy spaces rather than enforcement lines is the conceptual shift Nigeria’s security governance urgently needs.

This piece advances that argument in four steps. It first identifies the structural governance gap at Nigeria’s borders. It then offers a conceptual reframing of the demands of border governance as a policy space. It situates Nigeria’s longstanding border governance weaknesses within the regional security vacuum deepened by the withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger from ECOWAS and the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). Finally, it advances the harder argument: that Nigeria cannot enforce its way to stable borders, and that only an evidence-driven, community-anchored model of governance offers a path to durable security at its frontiers.