By Mary Onyia
The Comptroller-General of Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Bashir Adewale Adeniyi, has urged a paradigm shift in the government’s approach to border management, calling for a deliberate effort to transform border communities from neglected zones into centres of opportunity.
According to Adeniyi, viewing these communities as partners to be invested in rather than problems to be managed would deliver far greater national security and economic dividends.
“We need to stop treating border communities like problems to be managed and start treating them like partners to be invested in.
“Every young person that we employ in a legitimate venture is someone we have kept out of the reach of traffickers. Prevention is cheaper than enforcement, and it is more humane”.
Adeniyi said this in a statement issued during the Customs Officers’ Wives Association Sustainability and Green Borders Summit held in Abuja at the weekend.
He noted that genuine empowerment, through eco-enterprises, youth employment, and targeted infrastructure, offers a sustainable alternative to the cycle of poverty, smuggling, and insecurity often associated with border regions.
The Customs Service boss also called for massive and direct investment in Nigeria’s border communities to promote sustainability and curb cross-border crimes, saying “talking about green borders” must now give way to action and funding that reaches people on the ground.
He noted that transforming Nigeria’s frontier communities required more than policy rhetoric and workshops but real financial commitment to empower women, youth, and small eco-enterprises.
“Let me be direct about what we need to do, and there are three things. First, we need to move from talking about green borders to actually building them.
“That means funding, heavy funding, not promises, not committees, not endless panel discussions. We need money that can reach women and young people on the ground, the ones doing the actual work.
“We need to stop treating border communities like problems to be managed and start treating them like partners to be invested in. They hold the key to a sustainable and secure border economy”, the statement read.
Adeniyi, who also chairs the World Customs Organisation Council, has repeatedly urged Nigeria and its partners to prioritise eco-friendly border management, describing it as central to both national security and economic development.
He added that the Nigeria Customs Service would continue to align its modernisation agenda with global sustainability goals, ensuring that trade facilitation efforts contribute to environmental protection and local empowerment.
“Sustainability is now part of border security. When we empower communities to thrive legally and sustainably, we make smuggling unattractive”, he said.
He unveiled plans to finance a national Green Border Project, aimed at promoting sustainability, empowering border communities, and reducing the impact of climate change across Nigeria’s frontiers.
“When you drive through our border towns, what do you see? Mountains of waste, young people with no opportunities, communities left behind.
“Smugglers find recruits not because people are criminals, but because survival looks different when you live on the edge of environmental collapse”.