Former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Lasun Yusuf, has warned that the economy and security of Nigeria will be worsened if the federal government considers reopening borders to ease hardship.
He stated that opening borders is not the solution to the hardship but the solution is that people should brace up and be ready to produce what they eat.
The former legislator, who spoke to Blueprint in Osogbo, Osun state, Tuesday, said the best way to move from the poor state to the developed is to produce and not to develop other countries’ economies.
He said: “It is not good for our borders to just be kept open, for so many reasons. Security is the least of it. One of the major things in a country that is aspiring to develop, particularly economically, is to make sure that you protect your border, to make sure that you don’t just bring in just anything. That will force the economy and the citizenry to make sure they begin to produce what they are going to consume. So, opening the border from an economic point of view is negative.
“Secondly, it is even far lesser than the economic impact that it will have, negatively on the economy. So, I don’t see why people are agitating for that. People are agitating for that. People are agitating for it because people are no longer able to describe how we are going to transition from the poor state that we are to the developed state. They can’t join it together. And whereas let me refer to India. When India got very poor, Gandhi said that in our lives, we were no longer going to buy food from anybody.”If you look at Nigeria today, we are not producing what we are consuming. Just anything is brought into the country in the name of border opening. It doesn’t make sense. It impacts negatively on the economy. And once you keep your border open, then the security part of it will now come in,” Yusuf said.