Border Closure: There’s Room For Talks - Ghanaian President

Ghanaian president, Nana Akufo-Addo

Ghanaian president, Nana Akufo-Addo on Tuesday said he was still hopeful that talks between his country and Nigeria over the closure of the Nigerian land borders would yield a positive result.

Akufo-Addo said this while addressing the delegation of a commercial bank from Nigeria.

He said, “There’s a lot of room for continuing talks between Nigeria and Ghana in order for a breakthrough to be reached,” reports MyJoyonline.

In a separate report, Akufo-Addo was said to have lamented how the border closure would affect regional integration.

Daily Trust reports him as saying, “We are about to enter a delicate period in the ECOWAS journey looking ahead of the possibility of a single currency and trying to forge greater integration among our economies and at the same time have important security and other issues which confront us.

“We have this business of the closure of the Benin border, which seems to some people to be a big blow to the ECOWAS project.”

Nigeria had closed her land borders in August and it had affected the activities of businessmen in Nigeria and Ghana.
Ghanaian traders had asked their government to retaliate, however, Ghanaian government officials have been interfacing with their Nigerian counterparts to resolve the issue.

Meanwhile, Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria on Tuesday said that Nigeria would only open its borders if her neighbours would agree to stop the smuggling of banned goods.