Nigeria, Cameroon Launch Joint Plan to Ease Border Trade
By Patience Ikpeme
Nigeria Customs Service and Cameroon Customs Administration have started a joint assessment of the Ekok-Mfum One-Stop Border Post. The goal is to make trade easier, improve border security, and speed up economic ties between countries in the region.
The exercise took place on Tuesday, 8 September 2026, and was called “Leveraging the Nigeria Customs Service Trade Modernisation Project to Advance Seamless Cross-Border Trade and Shared Prosperity.” It brought together customs leaders, technical experts, security agencies, development partners, and community leaders from both Nigeria and Cameroon.
The event led to the official launch of the Mfum-Ekok Border Modernisation Initiative. This programme is meant to move customs work online, improve infrastructure at the border, and open up new trade opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
Comptroller-General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi, said the initiative is built on a relationship that already exists between the two countries, but the plan is to grow it so it can benefit the whole region. “We are not building from nothing. We are taking something that works between the two of us and asking whether it can be made to work for the region and hopefully for our continent,” he said. He added that the project has technical and financial support from the African Development Bank, ECOWAS, ECCAS, Afreximbank, and the AfCFTA Secretariat.
Adeniyi said technical teams from Nigeria and Cameroon recently visited the Beitbridge Border Post between South Africa and Zimbabwe to study how it works and learn from it. He said a joint agreement between the two countries is being put together by technical experts and is expected to be signed at the upcoming C-PACT conference.
On the Cameroon side, Director General of Customs, Fongod Nuvaga, called the assessment the “first concrete step toward unified border operations.” He said the two countries need systems that can work together. “We must move to real-time data sharing and joint risk-management so cargo and travellers are processed once rather than subjected to duplicate checks,” he said.
The Mfum-Ekok Border Modernisation Initiative will be run by trade technology specialists. It aims to bring in digital processing, a single-window system, and joint physical inspections, so that goods and travellers spend less time and money crossing the border. Officials said this should help small and medium-size businesses that rely on the route, and also raise more customs revenue by improving compliance and catching risks early.
Development partners who attended the assessment spoke about how important the project is for the region. A representative from the African Development Bank said that when major border posts like this one work well together, it brings the region closer to AfCFTA’s goal of free-flowing trade across Africa, and can help grow the communities living along the border.
The next steps are to complete the joint agreement, set up systems that can share information between both countries, repair and upgrade the physical buildings at Mfum and Ekok, and test out a single-stop clearance process. Officials said they will also involve local communities and train customs and border staff at the same time, so the changes are adopted smoothly.
Stakeholders said that if the plan works as expected, the Mfum-Ekok initiative could become a model that other border posts across West and Central Africa can copy, helping both trade and regional unity.
