The Noepe-Akanu Joint Border Post Revisited

via The Noepe-Akanu Joint Border Post Revisited

The Noepe-Akanu Joint Border Post Revisited

I was present for the inauguration of the Joint Border Post (elsewhere known as a One-Stop Border Post) by President Mahama of Ghana and  President Faure Togo back in November 2014. The buildings lay empty until October 2018 when it was formally opened for business. A year on, the Noepe-Akanu facility remains only partly functional. All the agencies from the two countries, including Customs and Immigration, are present and raring to go, but it remains only partially operational.

Apart from the lack of mutual compatibility of the Customs systems, there are also some ongoing issues of connectivity that the two sides are working together to resolve. The Ghanaians cannot handle the laissez-passer electronically which means that trucks continue to pass through Aflao. According to estimates of officials posted there, only around 60 cargo trucks and possibly some 3 buses pass through the JBP per week. Immigration in Ghana deals with around 200 people per week, including members of the nearby communities. The facility is therefore grossly under-utilized, despite the substantial financial outlay.  And this makes it difficult to persuade the governments to pay for the regular maintenance of the facility. This means that there is a good chance that expensive equipment will be left to rust. As things stand, the cargo scanner is used intermittently and the human and baggage scanners for passengers are lying unused. This ought to be a source of some concern because the JBP, which is a joint UEMOA-ECOWAS initiative, was constructed with EU funding to the tune of €13,605,430.

The JBP is supposed to represent a key link in the infrastructure chain along the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor. The optimistic vision is that it will represent a link in the regional chain transporting goods  northwards to the Sahel. But the Eastern Corridor in Ghana, which is expected to pass through the Volta and Oti Regions, and which entails a new rail link and improved roads, would surely undermine the need for the Akanu crossing. The Ghana talks the talk of regional integration, but it regards the Togolese road to the Sahel as a competitor. Again, it is difficult to imagine that the ECOWAS market that has been promised to Dzodze would take off unless there was a very substantial increase in the volume of traffic passing along the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor. As things stand, there are so many disincentives to trading along the corridor that it is hardly used. The claim by ECOWAS that the corridor accounts for 70 per cent of transit trade in the region is surely a fantasy. The ECOWAS highway is effectively devoid of traffic, except for some taxis and motorbikes that run between towns like Dzodze and Akatsi. Even if all the trucks were re-routed from Aflao to the JBP, it would still be under-utilized.

The JBP symbolizes the mismatch between the grand vision of regional integration, as articulated at the ECOWAS level, and the perceived interests of member states who often have other priorities. For the officials posted to the JBP, and who currently have very little work to do, this is undoubtedly very frustrating. They are keen to get things working as they should. With elections coming up in Ghana and Togo in 2020, maybe the politicians are keeping their powder dry and will inject the cash that is needed to transform the fortunes of the facility. But the underlying issues go much deeper than issues of funding and IT compatibility.

As things, the JBP is is in danger of becoming another expensive white elephant. For those, especially people in Aflao, who claim that it was built in entirely the wrong location, for reasons of political expediency, it will be a case of ‘told you so’!

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (5): Lagos and Back

via Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (5): Lagos and Back

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (5): Lagos and Back

Lagos workshop and Back to Cotonou, 21 March

The concluding workshop in Lagos, which was hosted by the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) and compered by the seasoned and irrepressible Nollywood actor Chika Anyanwu, was attended by representatives of the private sector and by Nigerian Immigration, Customs and Port Health. The ETLS Task Force report was presented, but with a particular focus on the specific findings relating to Benin and Nigeria. The principal conclusion was that Benin had a multiplicity of tariff barriers (essentially a series of taxes and levies), but inconsiderable non-tariff barriers (despite complaints about klébés), whereas in Nigeria the situation was reversed.

The non-tariff barriers in Nigeria included non-recognition of certificates of origin and a prohibition list on imports that includes a number of ETLS-approved products. The most interesting new presentation was by the NSC itself which detailed current efforts by Nigeria to streamline procedures and to speed up the flow of goods. It is a source of some pride that Nigeria has significantly improved its ranking within the World Bank’s Doing Business index from 169 to 145 (out of 190 countries). See http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2018

Benin’s forging ahead with Single Window has apparently stirred Nigeria into a flurry of reforms whose impact it will be interesting to assess in the coming years – especially with respect to the competitiveness of Apapa port. The problem appears to be that government agencies are wedded to different platforms. This is, of course, a very familiar problem. The representative from Customs did not address the interface with other agencies, but was adamant that their own procedures are transparent and straightforward. His case was it is the importer or exporter who generates the document that Customs uses. It is only if the business or its agent has entered the wrong HS codes, he noted, that there is likely to be serious complications.

As before, vociferous criticisms emanated from the floor. A representative of transporters complained that there are so many checkpoints on the Seme road that it is very difficult to conduct any kind of organized trade across the border – meaning that much of the legitimate business had been killed off. A representative of the shippers made some of the same criticisms, although he noted that there was a great of trade coming through the Benin border because of the limited functionality of the Apapa port. A repeated complaint from non-governmental participants was that they had voiced their complaints at a number of such meetings, and yet nothing ever seemed to change. Customs did not respond to the specific points concerning the land border, but Immigration insisted that it had been working to tackle the source of the complaints. One participant explained that there is a Border Command which deals with stamping passports and a Border Patrol which maintains three checkpoints alongside another two mobile patrols. He pointed out that they had set up a compliance team to carry out spot-checks and to ensure that harassment along the roads became a thing of the past. The obvious issue here is that Nigeria’s import bans – part of an effort to protect the rice industry, amongst others – has led to a renewed surge in smuggling. Much of the contraband trade bypasses the Seme border, which is presumably part of the reason why the Border Patrol feels the need to maintain so many road blocks along the Seme-Badagry road.

With Adidjaotu Pounpouni and Master of Ceremonies, Nollywood actor, Chika Anyanwu

Winding Up

By the time, the meeting concluded, it was already mid-afternoon which meant that Lagos was in complete gridlock. After around two hours of being trapped in Lagos traffic, we finally made it on to the Badagry road, arriving some five and a half hours later in Cotonou. I have already referred to the parlous state of the roads, but once again it was the number of checkpoints that stood out. In the short passage from Badagry to Seme, we were stopped something like fifteen times – by Immigration, Police and Customs, but twice also by young men carrying sticks who had taken it upon themselves to block the road and question the drivers and passengers. On a road that has been infamous for armed robbery in the past, this hardly creates a very secure atmosphere for the traveller or for anyone trying to transport their goods. The same is true of Seme itself, where young men who have no official role take it upon themselves to check documents, grant or refuse entry and to demand money for their services that are conducted under duress. The proliferation of checkpoints manned by state agents, and others that have no official status, is no secret to anyone – as the various interventions at the workshop made clear. The fact that the situation is allowed to continue would suggest once again that facilitating the movement and people and goods along the Nigerian stretch of corridor remains a limited priority for the various agencies and for the government itself. As Ghanaians would say: “They are not serious!”

Leaving Lagos

Leaving (2): No Way Through

So after 11 days on the road, what have we learned? The first conclusion is that while there is notionally a single corridor, it is perhaps more helpful to think of it in terms of discrete segments, given that almost no vehicles travel form one end to the other. Belying the trade statistics between Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, there is no evidence of Nigerian vehicles crossing into Côte d’Ivoire or vice-versa. We were the four-wheeled exception that proved the rule! As is true in West Africa more generally, most trade is conducted with the immediate neighbouring country – a pattern that long pre-dates the corridors.

A second finding is that, with the sole exception of Nigeria, the state of the roads has greatly improved in recent years – especially in Benin. Although ALCo is mostly single-track, the quality of the roads is good. But if the volume of heavy-goods traffic were to increase, one wonders if the current infrastructure would be able to cope. Thirdly, lobbying of governments has brought some improvements in the removal of unnecessary tariff barriers, as the Benin case would indicate. But there has been less success with removing the non-tariff barriers where there are so many actors involved. Putting it simply, while central government can decree the ending of a tax and it happens, ending the many blockages on the road has proved less easy to accomplish. Togo has been the most responsive on the question of roadblocks, whereas in Ghana the implementation has not matched the promise. The issue of axle load limits is one on which ECOWAS countries are yet to find a common position. The weigh stations remain a major source of delay, expense and grievance. Fourthly, the land borders remain a serious problem because of the length of time, and the high cost, it takes to get goods through. Although ALCO statistics reveal that there are significant variations, in general the greatest impediment to the fulfilment of the corridor resides in a combination of high fees and long delays.

Back on the Road Again

The Last Crossing: Back into Ghana at Kodjviakope

Finally, there remains the tricky question of how one actually changes established patterns. There is clearly no lack of knowledge about what is happening along the corridor. The deficit lies in the unwillingness of state actors to change their ways of operating. As I have indicated in an earlier posting, altering bureaucratic behaviour is no simple matter. Even if there is the political will at the top, it is still another thing to change institutional cultures. The lesson of OSBPs in East Africa is that they can help to avoid duplication, but they can also be an aid to institutional change. Where bureaucracies from two countries are forced to work together, they inevitably have to start thinking about their work in a different way. That is an important first step, but it needs to be matched by systems that incentivize border officials to embrace reform. One hopes that the OSBPs on the ALCo that have already been constructed will be opened for business before too long because at the moment there appears to be an institutional logjam that is almost as intractable as the Lagos traffic.

So there ends the Abidjan-Lagos corridor journey: 2,056 kilometres under the belt (give or take a few), and innumerable discussions and encounters that I will be digesting for some weeks to come.

I owe a special thanks to the Borderless Alliance for letting me tag along on the caravan, to members of the Ghana Shippers Authority in Aflao and the Nigerian Shippers’s Council in Seme for their practical assistance, and to the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor Organization (ALCO) for information shared. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (4): From Cotonou to Lagos, and Through the Wormholes

via Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (4): From Cotonou to Lagos, and Through the Wormholes

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (4): From Cotonou to Lagos, and Through the Wormholes

To Cotonou 15 March and then Kraké-Seme workshop on Benin-Nigeria Border, 19 March 

The trip from Lomé to the Benin border – from one side of Togo to the other – is along a  good single-track road that does not have any obvious roadblocks, although current ALCO  figures  suggest there are four (there are tyres across the road at a couple of places, but no Police presence). From past experience, its not a stretch of road that seems to carry a lot of heavy-goods vehicles. It is only as one approaches the Sanveekondji crossing that one encounters large number of trucks parked by the roadside. Exiting Togo is fairly easy. UEMOA citizens are waved through on presenting their identity cards. Other ECOWAS citizens, and everyone else, present their documents in one office, and passports are then scanned at a separate window. At the Benin side, its considerably slower because everything is entered by hand by policiers on physical forms. Passports are not scanned and no biometric data is collected, which is surprising because this has become the norm along the corridor. Clearing the final gate involved more of a negotiation as the douaniers sought to create multiple excuses for creating a blockage – before finally relenting.

The road across Benin is in an excellent condition and becomes a two-lane highway in the short stretch from Ouidah to Cotonou. And then one encounters the well-structured mayhem that is the city of Cotonou. There are very few taxis in Cotonou – the exact opposite of Accra. The city is dominated by the okada (motorcycle taxis) that ferry people along the sweeping boulevards into the city – with separate lanes for the okada along much of the way. The traffic jams are plentiful, and the near-misses are constant, but the transport system in Cotonou seems to work pretty well – provided you are not a pedestrian! There are no obvious signs of frenetic construction that one sees in other capitals, but there is a certain vibrancy surrounding Cotonou which, no doubt, owes a great deal to proximity to the senior brother next door.

Competition for the Road in Cotonou

The distance from Cotonou to the Kraké border post is very short. At the border itself, the okada weave between the lumbering hulks that are the trucks that are either parked (for whatever reason) or have temporarily stalled during the attempt to find a way through. There are control posts for the two countries – with formalities carried out in most cases from inside recycled shipping containers – but in practice it is not entirely clear where one country ends and the other begins. If there ever was a no-man’s land, it ceased to exist a long time ago. Seme is where a very large proportion of the more than one million Ghanaians who were forced to leave Nigeria got stuck in 1983. Those who could not leave Apapa by ship attempted the overland passage, only to discover that Benin had closed the border – and so took solace in the consumption of Bob Marley and kebabs until the border was finally reopened (listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvsvc ).

Today, the feature that dominates the landscape is the impressive One-Stop Border Post (OSBP)  for Benin and Nigeria that has been constructed on what is technically Benin territory (again, in the absence of any obvious no-man’s land). The completed structures, which look very similar to those in East Africa, are surrounded by a wall and controlled gates at either end, in such a way that the daily bustle is separated from the administrative buildings. But the facility has yet to be declared open for business. Why this has not happened is on the face of it rather baffling, given that what unfolds on the other side of the wall represents one big blockage –  which turns into a veritable mudfest in the rainy season. All of the people I have asked (including some officials) have a very straightforward interpretation, namely that if border-crossing procedures were carried out in an exposed place – that is outside the confines of the shipping containers – it would be much more difficult for officials to solicit bribes. Putting it crudely, the OSBP would change the nature of Customs and Immigration work.

Unopened OSBP at Kraké-Seme Border

Waiting for the Set-up with Adidjatou POUNPOUNI from WILDAF, Togo

Ironically, the border workshop took place in a field inside the OSBP compound – much of it nicely decorated with plants. The meeting was attended by large numbers of officials from both sides of the border, as well as the Nigerian Ambassador to Benin and the mayor from the Benin side of the border. Unfortunately, my own attendance was cut-short by having to deal with the challenge of securing a visa-on-arrival for Nigeria at Seme – something that does not really exist. I had not officially left, or been stamped out of Benin, before entering Nigeria in search of a solution to the problem. I spent much of my time walking the back streets, and taking okada through the the various wormholes around Seme with an Immigration officer, – all in search of the magic letter that would allow me to proceed to Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA). The time spent in various Immigration offices, as well as multiple trips back and forth across the notional border crossing, were certainly not wasted time. It afforded a chance to talk to Immigration officers in Nigeria, who were very receptive, and to observe how much of the crossing procedure was actually negotiable – for example, in relation to health requirements. Eventually, with no resolution in sight, I decided get a stamp to formally leave Benin, before returning to the meeting at the OSBP grounds – back inside Benin! By this point, the programme was winding down. But I re-entered the meeting at the point when a Beninois driver was venting his spleen about the levels of extortion and harassment that he and his colleagues routinely faced inside Nigeria – to the point of visibly, and audibly, getting under the skin of various officials who were present. When the meeting formally closed, I approached the driver who explained that non-Nigerians who drive trucks on the other side of the border are subjected to a level of harassment often bordering on physical violence. Hats off to him: he was not going to be silenced. Much of the rest of the discussion turned on the proliferation of taxes that are levied on vehicles crossing border at either end of Benin, as well as the hot issue of the klébés within the country.

Meeting in Session

At the end of the meeting, I parted company with the caravan and took a car to the airport with the same Immigration officer in an attempt to collect the elusive visa. To be perfectly blunt, it makes little sense to refer to the existence of a corridor from the moment one leaves Seme. The roads are manifestly too narrow and badly potholed, making this by far the worst road along the corridor. Indeed, one wonders how if successive Nigerian governments really took regional integration seriously, they could have allowed a main artery such as this to have reached its current abject condition. The driver suggested that there were plans to re-do the road, but there is no heavy equipment to indicate that any roadworks are actually ongoing. And then there are the infamous checkpoints. In a 24-minute period of travel from Seme, I counted 12 active checkpoints where we stopped and were required to respond to questions – which must surely be some kind of an international record. At some places, they were literally metres apart – and in one instance, we encountered two Immigration checkpoints within 50 metres of one another. One of the problems is that each state agency has multiple sub-units – at least three from Police attended the workshop and I was told there are four in Immigration – all of which feel the need to be in on the act. From the bridge at Agbara (17 stops until this point!), the checkpoints disappear to be replaced by a scrum of large and small vehicles and the okada. Only the okada can really get through at something quicker than a geriatric’s stroll. When one talks of delays at border crossings, it is worth remembering what it requires to actually get a truck through such incredible bottlenecks along what is supposed to be an international highway. Nigeria has its urban transport issues, to be sure, but given the state of the entire corridor from Seme, it is difficult believe that it has been considered anything other than a rhetorical priority. I am frankly amazed.

Road From Seme to Lagos

On a more positive note, MMIA which used to be notorious – to the extent that Nigerians often preferred to fly through Cotonou rather than run the gauntlet – seems transformed. In search of that visa again, I entered and exited multiple wormholes at the airport in search of the correct approvals and signatures. The officials were extremely courteous and helpful, and the airport seemed to be pretty stress-free, judging from the faces of those coming in off international flights. MMIA even offers free wifi for passengers that actually works! If only the same model could be transposed to the land borders which remain thoroughly unreconstructed – and not merely in the sense of the physical infrastructure. At the present moment, the Nigerian side of the notional ALCO corridor should be considered an embarrassment – and one that no amount of talk will resolve or paper over.

There can be no starker contrast between the realities of the road from Seme to Lagos and the Eko Atlantic City development on Victoria island. The Abidjan-Lagos Corridor and the remaking of Lagos are both heralded as evidence of planning for the future – a vision with Lagos as a global mega-city at the epicentre. At the moment, it is clear which  is winning: Nigeria seeks to go global while regional integration will follow. It bears repeating that only 6% of Nigerian exports are destined for ECOWAS countries. Ironically, while the Eko Atlantic City project is being summoned into life – there are now some imposing buildings going up on the land reclamation site which – it is underpinned by speculative finance, and could stall at any moment. By contrast, while trade across the land border is grounded in recurring certainties, infrastructure has not been a priority. Here is hoping that the Seme-Lagos road will start to attract the attention it deserves.

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (3): Reflections from the Aflao-Kodjoviakope Border

via Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (3): Reflections from the Aflao-Kodjoviakope Border

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (3): Reflections from the Aflao-Kodjoviakope Border

En Route from Abidjan to Lomé, 14 March, and at Aflao/Kodjoviakope Border Workshop, 15 March

Abidjan once enjoyed the reputation of being Africa’s most ‘modern’ city outside of South Africa – that is before the economic and political and crisis exacted its toll on the physical infrastructure of the capital. Today, Abidjan feels like its on the way up again – with a Moroccan-financed marina development representing the new face of the city centre. On the way out of Abidjan, heading in the direction of the border, one travels along a rather impressive three-lane highway. By Bonoua, however, one is back on single-track and indeed it remains so until one reaches the outskirts of Accra. Nevertheless, the roads are generally of high quality. Indeed, the state of the roads is what enabled us travel all the way from Abidjan to Lomé in fifteen-and-a-half hours.

The New Marina Under Construction with Futuristic Cathedral in Centre

Leaving Abidjan

En route, I counted 2 check-points in Côte d’Ivoire and 20 in Ghana, almost all of which were manned by the Police and some of which were of a temporary nature. There was a particular concentration between Sogakope and the Aflao border, which probably reflects the fact that it was night-time by that point. We were only stopped twice, although if we had been a truck or a passenger bus the story would probably have been rather different. What is striking is that there was a considerable number of heavy goods vehicles on the roads until about Elmina and then very little. I did not witness any Ivoirien number-plated trucks on the road beyond this point which reinforced the impression that the vehicles head north to Kumasi rather than continuing along the corridor. On the road from Lomé to Cotonou, Ivoirien and Nigerian vehicles were equally absent from the road in either direction.

The general rule of thumb is that it is much more difficult to enter than to leave a country. Hence exiting Noé was much less complicated than entering. On the way in, one has to deal with Douanes and then the Police who normally deal with Immigration in the Francophone countries. They duplicate much of the paperwork, for example with regard to processing foreign vehicles. After clearing these border hurdles, one encounters rather heavy-handed Douanes and Police checkpoints about a kilometre further on. Coming the other way, however, the latter show little interest. At the border, it is necessarily to fill out an emigration card and have one’s passport scanned. On the Ghana side, the ease of exiting Elubo is also rather different to the experience of entering. Non-Ghanaians are routinely shaken down regardless of whether they have the ‘correct’ travel documents. At the Ghana-Togo border, it is easy enough to complete exit formalities at Ghana Immigration and one does not normally encounter Customs. As one enters Togo, one has to fill out another Police immigration form and have one’s biometric details recorded. But this is relatively painless, and Customs seems to be rather light-touch for passenger vehicles. In fact, Togo is the one country that considerably cleaned up its act in recent years. Almost all of the checkpoints along the corridors have been removed, and border crossings have become much more ‘friendly’. This may reflect Togo’s interest in developing its economic links with its neighbours. It is striking that Togo despatches as much as 59% of its exports to other members of ECOWAS, by contrast with 27% in Côte d’Ivoire, 11% in Ghana and 6% in Nigeria.

Launch of Aflao workshop

Although Togo thinks regionally, the ongoing political uncertainty in the country are continuing to be felt in Lomé with the closure of a number of hotels. Certainly Lomé lacks the sense of an urban rebirth that one feels in Abidjan. The day after arrival in Lomé, a workshop involving government officials and users from the two sides of the border was convened in the Customs yard at Aflao. However, the Togolese Police did not send any representative and the contribution of the Douanes was limited. Amongst the users were Freight Forwarders, transporters and women’s associations. The joint research findings of Borderless and the Lomé-based Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF) on the experience of women traders along the corridor were in line with the discussions in Abidjan. A second report focused on this specific border crossing. It revealed that the Aflao/Kodjoviakope crossing is the most expensive for commercial users, averaging $60 to $70, which one participant claimed was more in the region of $80. Counter-intuitively perhaps, the Sanveekondji/Hillakondji crossing (Togo-Benin) was found to be the least expensive along the corridor. But this I possibly explained by the reality this is the only border where two UEMOA member states meet. In their contribution, Ghana Customs spoke to the decision to go paperless and noted that there were now joint inspections of vehicles by Customs and other agencies to avoid duplication of procedures and speed things up. The head of Ghana Immigration also indicated that an Integrated Border Management (IBM) would soon be trialled at Aflao, involving Customs, Immigration and other agencies. Both Customs and Immigration bemoaned the lack of awareness of many of the regulations on the part of border users, and the former blamed errant Freight Forwarders for some of the problems. They both dwelt on the problems occasioned by “miscreants” who congregated around the border, robbing travellers en route. Others, it was said, encouraged people to use the informal crossings by motor-bike where they were especially vulnerable to being cheated. One of the structural problems is that Ghana Police are not present at the border itself, which creates a grey zone for policing around the crossing point. The marginalization of the Police in Ghanaian border security is quite the opposite to the position in Togo and Côte d’Ivoire where the Police seem to take the lead. This creates an interesting problem for bringing agencies into dialogue across the border because they are actually tasked with quite different operations.

The women’s associations were rather meek in their responses from the floor, accepting the need for better education of their members. However, the Freight Forwarders and transporters were much more forthright – claiming systematic harassment at the Aflao border which, one participant insisted, had to be resolved before trade liberalization became a meaningful point of discussion. As I have indicated in an earlier blog post, traders from Abidjan complain about having to pay for crossing both of Ghana’s southern borders. While the situation in Togo was described as broadly positive, specific complaints were made about the situation in Benin where a host of taxes are levied – and in particular a very high transit fee. A specific allegation was that weigh stations at opposite ends of the corridor produce divergent readings on axel loads in order to catch out drivers and fleece them for money. The axel load issue remains a live one because the transporters are concerned that a plan to reduce the load limit will have an adverse effect, but at the moment ECOWAS states are not in agreement on whether this should proceed. It seems that klébés are particular issue in Benin where local authorities impose levies on vehicles passing through their towns. Apparently lobbying of the government has produced some results in terms of the removal of taxes and the reduction of barriers, but Benin remains one of the countries that is least compliant with ECOWAS rules. Hence the two classic entrepôt states, Togo and Benin, seem to have embraced regional integration in rather different ways.

The Abidjan Lagos Corridor Organization (ALCO) presented some statistics on port dwell and border crossing times. As one might expect, Apapa (Lagos) was the least efficient port in 2016, with an average dwell time of 22 days, followed by Tema (15 days), Cotonou (14.5), Lomé (12) and Abidjan (11). The least efficient border crossing in 2016 was Kraké/Seme on the Benin-Nigeria border, where vehicles entering Kraké could expect to wait an average of 27 hours, which rose to 31 hours for trucks entering Seme. By comparison, the Aflao/Kodjoviakope border looked like a model of good practice: 11 hours in the one direction and 13 hours in the other. Trucks entering Noé took 11 hours to clear (it has a cargo scanner although I am not sure if it is functional), but this rose to 21 hours for those entering Elubo. The greatest discrepancy was at Sanveekondji/Hillakondji. Goods entering the Benin side could expect to wait 20 hours whereas those entering Togo would wait for only 5 hours on average. These discrepancies reflect the different trajectories of trade, but they also underline the point that while border management in Benin and Nigeria has been extremely cumbersome, Togo has managed to effectively tackle some of the bottlenecks. The weight times at Kodjoviakope have been reduced by well over a half since 2012. Ghana’s record has been significantly better at Aflao, despite the high costs, than at Elubo. But even the more flattering figures – with the exception of Sanveekondji – are significantly worse than in East Africa where One-Stop Border Posts (OSBPs) have slashed waiting times. In 2011, for example, the average wait for trucks entering Busia-Uganda from Kenya was 14 hours and 20 minutes, whereas in 2017 this had tumbled to 3 hours and 40 minutes. The failure to follow through on OSBPs means that ALCo countries certainly get much less out of the corridor than they could. Interestingly in the Aflao meeting, there was no discussion of the future of the Noepe-Akanu OSBP or indeed the Beat 9 pedestrian portal which I have referred to in an earlier posting.

Lomé Container Terminal

The Aflao meeting raised issues far beyond the Aflao/Kodjoviakope border crossing which I hope to keep track of as we snake our way along the corridor.

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (2): Reflections on Launch

via Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (2): Reflections on Launch

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (2): Reflections on Launch

Launch Workshop in Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Côte d’Ivoire (CCI-CI), Abidjan, 13 March

At the launch of the caravan in Abidjan, two substantive contributions were delivered. The first presentation outlined findings from enquiries carried out by the Borderless Alliance at the Elubo/Noé crossing on the Ghana/Côte d’Ivoire border. The main focus was on the problems experienced by women who carry out almost all of the trade across the border. The reality of everyday extortion and harassment (including sexual) was highlighted. There was also reference to lengthy delays and inadequate infrastructure at the border. The road on the Ivoirien side is currently in the process of being rebuilt which may account for some of the infrastructural problems, such as the lack of running water.

The focus on women traders is important because, as I have indicated in an earlier blog post, large numbers of traders from Abidjan board buses to Aflao, and then cross to Lomé on foot to purchase goods, before making the return journey. When the buses reach Noé, the goods are unloaded and the duties are identified and paid before everything is reloaded and the bus continues its journey – a process that takes more than 3 hours. On the way to Abidjan, when our own vehicle was grounded at Noé because of characteristic bureaucratic obtuseness, the delay afforded an opportunity to observe the process of dédouanement at close quarters. Most of the traders had brought large metal cooking vessels and electrical goods from Lomé – although I am told cloth remains a major item (as one might expect) and some women were importing polystyrene takeaway boxes. The Douanes had deployed perhaps 20 men, in yellow coats with hard hats, whose job was to help with the loading and repackaging. That was at least an indication of intent to facilitate the process of clearing the goods relatively expeditiously. But at Noé there is certainly no sense in which the Douanes relate to people as ‘customers’ – as URA officers in Uganda are encouraged to conceive of their role. On the contrary, this is old-style border bureaucracy which is officious and operates according to its own tempo. The traders created an impressive din amongst themselves. This was not the noise associated with camaraderie and conviviality – nobody was laughing – but I took it to be an exercise in claiming the space that was the Customs yard. The douaniers (all men) seem to have accepted that this had become a kind of female space, hoever fleetingly. This picture was very different to what I encountered at Noé a few days later. On this occasion, a passenger bus was going through the same Customs procedures, but there was almost total silence as men, women and children waited patiently – with a resigned expression on their faces – for the douaniers to go about their business at a snail’s pace.

Passenger Bus at Noé, Côte d’Ivoire

Abidjan-Lagos Corridor Organization (ALCO) Information Office, Noé

 

The second contribution came the ECOWAS Task Force on Trade Liberalization which was mandated to look into impediments to the free movement of people and goods. The Task Force identified a wide range of tariff and non-tariff barriers, some of which are more familiar than others. With regard to the former, it identified a range of taxes imposed at border crossings, including road taxes, transit fees and statistical taxes (levied at 5%). At least one tax was being levied in the absence of the service it was supposed to support: namely a tracking tax. The report also itemized the innumerable non-tariff barriers that exist along the routes: including mis-aligned opening hours; non-recognition of animal health certificates; the prohibition of approved articles; non-recognition of certificates of origin; a multiplicity of governmental agencies with overlapping mandates; systematic extortion by state officials at the borders and long the corridors; and a proliferation of klébés, or roadblocks thrown up by non-state actors, including local authorities. Although these findings were not intended to refer specifically to the ALCo, all of these elements are clearly endemic along the corridor.

One hopes that the report will receive wider circulation because it amounts to a serious indictment of the ways in which ECOWAS member states manage their borders. The report refers to the need to strengthen political will within ECOWAS and to the need to sensitize the principal actors involved in border management. But a serious question remains as to whether member states really intend to follow through on what they have formally signed up to. After all, none of these issues are being raised for the first time, and – with the exceptions of the complexities surrounding Customs regulations – everyone understands the deal, how it operates and who benefits at different levels of the system. The task for ECOWAS is to keep pointing to the lack of compliance, but its capacity to exert genuine pressure is also rather circumscribed. This is where the importance of a pressure-group like the Borderless Alliance resides: in continuing to point to the abuses and in lobbying for governments to do more to come clean.