Women account for about 70 per cent of informal cross-border traders along the Nigeria-Benin corridor, but harassment, extortion and delays are making the trade increasingly difficult for the people who depend on it for their livelihoods, the Nigeria Customs Service has said.
The Comptroller-General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi, disclosed this weekend, at the Seme-Krake Border during a joint Nigeria-Benin Republic One Stop Border Post assessment.
Adeniyi said the scale of women’s participation in informal trade should force authorities to look beyond border infrastructure and agreements when assessing the success of economic integration between the two countries.
He said many of the women engaged in the trade were supporting children and other dependants from their businesses, stressing that what appeared to be small-scale transactions at the border often represented the economic lifeline of entire households.
According to him, 22 per cent of Benin Republic’s informal exports are destined for Nigeria, while informal trade accounts for about a fifth of economic activity in Nigeria and an even larger share in Benin.
The Customs boss said women traders on the corridor routinely reported harassment, extortion and delays while crossing, warning that such experiences could push legitimate traders further away from the formal system.
“Where a border is slow, opaque or intimidating, the trader with the least capacity to absorb cost is the one driven around it, and once she is driven around it, we lose her twice: she loses the protection of the law, and the state loses the revenue,” Adeniyi said.
He said Customs would therefore establish a dedicated facility for women traders, designed to make formal cross-border trading easier through simplified procedures for small consignments, clear information in languages traders understand and accessible channels for complaints.
Adeniyi said the facility would also provide protection against unofficial demands and give traders a mechanism through which cases of mistreatment by officials could be reported and addressed.
He argued that the distinction between formal and informal trade was sometimes determined less by the trader’s willingness to comply with the law than by whether the formal process was affordable, understandable and accessible.
The Customs chief said the effectiveness of the Nigeria-Benin border arrangement should ultimately be judged by how quickly goods and people could cross, rather than by the number of agreements signed or facilities commissioned.
He said a successful system should allow a woman trader to cross with her goods within an hour rather than spend an entire day at the border, while ensuring that officials on both sides could access the same information and process consignments without unnecessary duplication.
Earlier, the Director General of Customs Administration of Benin Republic, Col. Raouf Malehossou Aboudou, reaffirmed his country’s commitment to improving the ease of doing business and strengthening cooperation with Nigeria at the border.
