The Vice-Chairman, Senate Committee on Customs, Senator Francis Fadahunsi, has urged Federal and state governments in the country to bring an end to COVID-19 induced lockdowns or risk economic collapse of the country.
Fadahunsi, a retired Deputy Comptroller-General of Customs, disclosed this in an interview published by Sunday Punch.
He said that Nigerians must also be allowed to return to churches and mosques so as to pray for healing from God.
“Let the Federal Government ease the lockdown and let the economy move because we can’t afford the current lockdown for six months, otherwise the country will collapse.
“Let people return to churches and mosques to pray for healing; after all, the rate of recovery is even high in the first instance,” the senator said.
Fadahunsi equally berated the Federal Government for closing the nation’s land borders pre-COVID-19, noting that the nation has lost N300 billion because of the “illegal” closure.
Besides the economic angle, he said, the closure violated various ECOWAS protocols Nigeria is signatory to and infringed on the right of Nigerians living in neighbouring countries to return freely to their country.
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He explained that the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) lacked the required personnel to effectively man the nation’s borders and the closure has become ineffective since December 2019 as many products were being freely brought into the country in spite of the closure.
Speaking on the effectiveness of the closure, Fadahunsi stated, “No, it is not effective because you can’t close your borders against your people.
“If you look at the local arrangement they are making, I mean the interstate lockdown, it is not working; people are still moving. If you say they should not move in the daytime, they will move at night. Are you not using the police to man the interstate borders?
“Also, I have told them that the man (Customs Comptroller General) who wants to close the nation’s borders has no sufficient officers. The highest number of officers he can boast of at the moment is 15, 000 and we don’t have up to 10, 000 of them wearing uniform. 15, 000 Customs officers cannot man South-West borders alone, not to talk of the entire country.
“So, the border closure arrangement is also not working because of the state of unpreparedness by the NCS.
“They would have put up a proper arrangement before implementing such a policy. Nigeria would have also carried other countries along in the process. For instance, our country has not submitted the list of prohibited goods. I mean those things we don’t want in the protocol and the sanctions when any prohibited good passes through a country into Nigeria.
“Any country that appends its signature in such a protocol is always afraid of international sanctions because such agreement must go to the United Nations. That’s the reason the border closure is not effective; we have not been able to force the list on them.”