Buhari, Talon meet over closure of Seme border

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*Talon, Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari has said that the partial closure of Nigeria’s border with Benin Republic was occasioned by unbridled smuggling activities, especially rice from Seme border into Nigeria.

Buhari stated this on Wednesday during a meeting with the Beninoise president, Mr. Patrice Talon at the ongoing 7th Tokyo International Conference for African Development (TICAD7) in Yokohama, Japan.

Spokesman for the president, Mr. Femi Adesina, said in a statement in Abuja  that Buhari expressed great concern over the smuggling of the commodity into the country.

The president said the smugglers activities are a threat to his administration’s  self-sufficiency in food production.

“Now that our people in the rural areas are going back to their farms, and the country has saved huge sums of money which would otherwise have been expended on importing rice using our scarce foreign reserves.

“We cannot allow smuggling of the product at such alarming proportions to continue,” he said.

The president said the limited closure of the country’s western border was to allow Nigeria’s security forces develop a strategy on how to stem the dangerous trend and its wider ramifications.

Responding to the concerns raised by Talon on the magnitude of suffering caused by the closure, Buhari said he had taken note and would reconsider reopening in the not too distant future.

He, however, disclosed that a meeting with his counterparts from Benin and Niger republics would soon be called to determine strict and comprehensive measures to curtail the level of smuggling across their borders.

Earlier, Talon said he called on Buhari because of the severe impact the closure of the Nigerian border had had on his people.

President Buhari also received in audience, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa during which issues of common bilateral relations especially, the killings of Nigerians in South Africa, were discussed.

“The matter will be further examined during Buhari’s  official visit to Pretoria in October. 2019,’’ said Adesina.

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