Who Enters Nigeria, Who Leaves, and Who Knows? By Eugene Nanven
Who Enters Nigeria, Who Leaves, and Who Knows? By Eugene Nanven
There are some conversations that appear ordinary when they happen, but become increasingly disturbing the more one thinks about them.
Some time ago, while I was in Abuja, I had a conversation with some young men who told me they were from Niger. They had come into Nigeria to work as commercial motorcycle riders. They worked, lived and moved around like many other people in the city. When it was time for holidays, they told me, they simply returned to Niger with their motorcycles. When the holiday was over, they came back to Nigeria and resumed their work.
At first, I did not think much of it.
But later, the question struck me: how does a country know who is coming in, who is leaving, where they are going and what they are bringing with them?
The young men I met may have been perfectly legitimate workers. There is nothing inherently suspicious about a Nigerien coming to Nigeria to earn a living, just as Nigerians routinely travel across West Africa for business, employment, family and other legitimate reasons. In fact, regional movement is an important part of West Africa’s economic and social life.
The problem, therefore, is what happens when a country cannot adequately distinguish legitimate movement from illegitimate movement.
That is where Nigeria’s border crisis deserves much greater national attention.
Nigeria possesses one of the largest and most strategically important territories in Africa. It shares land borders with Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, and its geographical position places it at the intersection of West Africa, the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin. These borders are gateways through which people, goods, capital, weapons, ideas and, increasingly, security threats move.
Yet the country’s border-management challenge has remained deeply troubling.
In June 2026, the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, described porous borders as a significant factor facilitating terrorism, arms trafficking, smuggling, human trafficking and irregular migration. The admission is important because it captures the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Nigeria’s border problem: the same borders that facilitate legitimate trade, regional integration and economic activity can also be exploited by those who wish to harm the country.
For years, Nigeria’s borders have been described as porous. The phrase has become so familiar that there is a danger of becoming numb to it, but a porous a national-security vulnerability.
Nigeria’s own National Border Management Strategy has previously acknowledged that expansive and poorly secured stretches of the country’s borders can facilitate the entry of undesirable elements. Research on Nigeria’s border porosity has similarly documented the existence of numerous unrecognised crossing routes alongside formal points of entry. The consequence is that the border can become less of a filter and more of a passage.
This matters enormously in a country already battling terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, arms trafficking and organised criminal networks.
Consider what a terrorist organisation requires to survive. It needs people, weapons, money, supplies, information and freedom of movement. It does not necessarily need to capture a city or defeat an army if it can establish networks that move men and materials across territories with limited detection.
Nigeria has seen how dangerous this can become.
The country’s security challenges are no longer confined neatly within state boundaries. Terrorist organisations operating around the Lake Chad Basin have historically exploited the borders between Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. More recently, the emergence and expansion of Lakurawa in the north-west has demonstrated how violent extremist threats can develop within borderland communities and acquire a distinctly transnational character. The Institute for Security Studies warned in February 2026 that sustained cross-border pressure and cooperation would be necessary to counter the group’s expansion.
The significance of this cannot be overstated. It is a proven fact that when insecurity crosses borders but security responses stop at the border, criminals gain an advantage.
An armed group can attack a community, retreat toward a borderland, reorganise across the frontier and return later. Criminal networks can move weapons through remote routes. Smugglers can exploit difficult terrain. Human traffickers can move people through areas where state presence is weak. Individuals involved in criminal activity can exploit differences in national laws, intelligence systems and enforcement capabilities. We have had thousands of cases like this.
The border therefore becomes part of the battlefield.
But there is another dimension to this crisis that deserves attention: border intelligence.
It is not enough for Nigeria to have immigration officers, customs personnel, soldiers or police officers stationed at formal checkpoints. Modern border security is fundamentally an intelligence problem.
A functional border-management system should be able to answer basic questions about movement across the frontier. Who entered? Who left? What is the purpose of the journey? What vehicle did the person use? What goods were transported? Where did the traveller go? When did the traveller return? Is the movement consistent with previous activity? Does the person appear in any security database? Are there patterns involving particular routes, vehicles or individuals?
If those questions cannot reliably be answered, then Nigeria have both a border-control problem, and an information problem.
And information is the foundation of modern security.
The story of the Nigerien motorcycle riders I encountered illustrates this perfectly. Their movement might have been entirely legitimate. They may have crossed the border legally or through arrangements common to communities that have interacted for generations. But if a person can repeatedly travel between countries, work in a major Nigerian city and transport a motorcycle across the frontier without the state possessing an effective record of that movement, the same weakness could potentially be exploited by someone with very different intentions.
That is the uncomfortable question Nigerians must be willing to ask.
If the state cannot adequately account for legitimate movement, how confident can it be about detecting illegitimate movement?
Well! This should not become an excuse for hostility towards immigrants.
Nigeria itself benefits enormously from regional mobility. Nigerian traders, farmers, students, professionals and transporters cross West African borders every day. Border communities often have ethnic, cultural and family relationships that existed long before modern African states drew their present boundaries. Trying to seal these communities off completely would be economically damaging, socially disruptive and practically unrealistic.
The objective should therefore not be to build an impenetrable Nigeria. The objective should be to build an intelligent Nigeria.
A secure border does not necessarily mean a border through which nobody passes. It means a border through which legitimate people and goods can move while the state maintains sufficient visibility to identify threats.
Nigeria needs substantially stronger surveillance across vulnerable stretches of its borders, particularly in areas where terrain makes conventional policing difficult. Technology should become a force multiplier rather than an afterthought. Ground sensors, drones, satellite imagery, biometric systems, automated vehicle recognition and integrated databases can help extend the reach of border personnel far beyond the physical checkpoint.
Artificial intelligence could also play a role by helping authorities identify unusual movement patterns. A system capable of correlating immigration records, vehicle movements, customs information, intelligence reports and geographic data could identify patterns that individual officers might never notice.
But, dare I say, technology alone will not solve the problem. Nigeria also needs better coordination among the Nigeria Immigration Service, Nigeria Customs Service, the military, police, intelligence agencies and state authorities. Information that exists in one agency but does not reach another is almost as dangerous as information that was never collected.
The country must also strengthen cooperation with neighbouring states.
Nigeria cannot defeat transnational terrorism through unilateral border control alone. The threats operating across the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin do not recognise the political disagreements between governments. The Multinational Joint Task Force, involving Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Benin, demonstrates that regional security cooperation is possible. The deterioration of political relations between ECOWAS and the Alliance of Sahel States, however, has made regional coordination more complicated at precisely the moment when cooperation remains essential. Nigeria must therefore pursue security cooperation even where diplomatic relations are difficult.
There is also a need to confront the economics of border insecurity. Where legal economic opportunities are weak and border enforcement is ineffective, smuggling becomes attractive. Fuel, food, livestock, weapons and other commodities can move through informal networks, enriching criminal organisations while depriving governments of revenue and weakening legitimate businesses.
Border communities should consequently be treated as partners in security.
Take for instance: the villager who knows which paths are regularly used by strangers, the transporter who notices unusual movements, the trader who understands the local routes and the traditional leader who knows the communities on both sides of the frontier can all possess valuable information. A government that combines this local knowledge with modern intelligence technology will be far more effective than one that relies exclusively on checkpoints.
Ultimately, Nigeria’s border crisis is about whether the Nigerian state has sufficient visibility over the movement of people and goods into and out of its territory.
My conversation with those young men from Niger has stayed with me because it revealed something deceptively simple. People can move. They can work. They can return home. They can come back.
And perhaps that is perfectly fine. But a country of more than 200 million people cannot afford to operate on the assumption that everyone crossing its frontiers is harmless.
The answer to this problem is not that Nigeria will embrace xenophobia, or collective suspicion of foreigners, neither will it be an indiscriminate closure of borders that sustain communities and economies.
The answer is competent border governance. Nigeria must know its borders. It must know who crosses them. It must know what moves through them.
And, most importantly, it must be capable of identifying the difference between an ordinary person seeking an honest livelihood and a person exploiting the same weakness to transport weapons, finance criminal networks or facilitate terrorism.
A country cannot fully secure what it cannot see. And Nigeria’s greatest border challenge may be that, for too long, we have not known enough about who is crossing, how they are crossing and what happens after they do.
That is a vulnerability Nigeria can no longer afford to ignore.
Eugene Nanven a public opinion analyst writes from Gwagwalada Abuja FCT
