Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has promised to reopen Nigeria’s land borders and develop ports in the southern part of the country if elected president in 2027.
Atiku, the African Democratic Congress presidential candidate, made the pledge while addressing supporters in a video shared Friday by ADC chieftain Dele Momodu.
He said restrictions on land borders had hurt legitimate cross-border trade and pushed many young Nigerians out of business.
“The Northern states is bordering Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Benin Republic,” Atiku said.
“And you close all those borders.
"All our young men who are doing trading between these countries, they carry goods across, they do this and that, all what we call transborder trade is a legitimate business.”
He said some young entrepreneurs with millions of naira in capital had gone bankrupt after the restrictions, leaving them and their workers unemployed.
“All the upcoming young men and women who used to have a capital of 10 million, 20 million, and they were employing two, three other people, and then all of them went bankrupt and unemployed.
"How can there be security?” he asked.
“So I said I am going to reopen the borders and I will,” Atiku added.
He also promised to improve ports in the South and South-East to make it easier to move imported goods to northern Nigeria.
Atiku said shipping a container from Lagos to Yola, Adamawa state, can take up to two months because of poor road infrastructure.
“But right now, it takes me not less than two months to take my container from Lagos because you have to cross over from South-West, you go to North-East, and then there is even no road,” he said.
Nigeria began a broad land-border closure in 2019 under former President Muhammadu Buhari to curb smuggling and encourage local production.
Some borders were later reopened, while others remain under tighter controls.
The Tinubu administration reopened additional border corridors in 2026.
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