Buhari's border closures and the Nigerian rice politics they were meant to fix

<p>In August 2019 the Buhari administration closed Nigeria&#x27;s land borders with Benin, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad. The closures lasted, formally, until December 2020 — though the easing was partial — and were explicitly framed as a measure to enforce the rice import substitution strategy that had been a Buhari priority since his 2015 election. The result was an experiment in coercive industrial policy that produced uncomfortable lessons.</p> <p>The intended logic was straightforward. Nigerian rice production had expanded under the 2015 Anchor Borrowers&#x27; Programme, which channeled Central Bank of Nigeria credit to smallholder rice farmers through cooperatives in Kebbi, Sokoto, Niger, and Ebonyi states. Domestic milling capacity had grown — Olam, Stallion, Coscharis, WACOT all expanding integrated mills. But cheap Thai parboiled rice continued to flow across the Benin border from Cotonou&#x27;s port, where Nigerian-origin importers had relocated to avoid Nigerian tariffs. The border closures targeted that smuggling route.</p> <p>The short-run effects were stark. Local rice prices rose roughly 30% in the first year of the closure. Domestic milling capacity utilisation rose from around 30% to closer to 60%. Anchor Borrowers smallholders saw farmgate prices rise. But — and this is the part the policy advocates underplayed — urban food inflation generally accelerated, hitting low-income households whose rice consumption is income-inelastic. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, then transitioning from Nigerian Finance Minister into her WTO role, was publicly critical of the closures&#x27; trade-policy implications under the AfCFTA framework that Nigeria had signed.</p> <p>The political-economy lesson is about who absorbs adjustment costs. Rice protectionism delivered gains to smallholder producers and integrated millers, costs to urban consumers, and an enforcement nightmare for the Nigeria Customs Service. The smuggling did not stop; it shifted to creek-and-canoe routes through the Niger Delta, harder to police than the Seme land crossing. By 2022 estimates from the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA) put smuggled rice at 20–25% of consumption, down from pre-closure 40–50% but not eliminated.</p> <p>The Tinubu administration, after the May 2023 transition, has not reversed the rice protectionism but has decoupled it from physical border closures, instead relying on tariff enforcement and the AfCFTA Common External Tariff schedule. The retreat from closure-as-tool is itself an admission: the costs were higher than projected, the benefits more concentrated than promised, and the underlying corruption problem — politically connected importers using political proximity to evade tariffs — was never resolved by shutting the gates.</p>