Udoh Ebaide, a Nigerian Afrobeats singer attempting to visit all 54 African countries on a bike, has lamented the corruption and harassment she experienced at the Republic of Benin border.
Ebaide, who posted a video detailing her experience with corrupt officials via her Instagram account on Monday, said her troubles with the corrupt road officials began as soon as she arrived at the Benin-Togo border. Once she got in, a man who wasn’t meant to stop her did.
As seen in the video, Ebaide asked the man if he was an immigration officer or an agent. After much hesitation, he responded that he was an agent. She then told him she did not need an agent for what she wanted to do, but he offered to help her.
While the man who stopped her was talking to her, another man started shouting at her. The first man then said that no one would disturb her if she offered him something. Ebaide responded, saying that no one was supposed to disturb her, whether or not she gave money.
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“The only thing I’ll pay for is customs, and that is because I want to enter Togo,” Ebaide told the man. “It is supposed to be N10,000.”
However, when she got off her motorbike to show her passport, they asked her to pay 2,000 CFA for something undefined, which they called ‘Aresti’.
“Why are they asking me to pay some money in Benin to be able to get out of Benin?” she asked in the video.
“I didn’t face this in East Africa. This is where I am from, and they are giving me issues,” she said. “I called the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and they told me to tell them to give me a receipt of payment. When I told them (to provide the receipt), they told me to go.”
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As she would later find out, the men were not supposed to stop her at the gate they did, as it was just an entrance to the border.
“I was told that those boys who stopped me work with the police. When they stop people at the gate, if you pay, your money is gone because they aren’t supposed to collect money from you,” she said.
Ebaide said when she got to immigration on the Benin side, more troubles were waiting for her. She paid 2,000 CFA to get a stamp, and when she asked what it was for, one man said it was “for formality”.
“The man began screaming at me and told me to get out. I then called the director of ECOWAS, who asked that I give them the phone, but the officials refused to speak to him. One man said I should get out because he didn’t know who called him. When the director called his superior, who called him, they then attended to me,” she said.
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In Undercover as Trafficked Person, different border officials also tried to extort money from Fisayo Soyombo, FIJ’s editor-in-chief, between Togo and Benin.
In the caption accompanying the video Ebaide posted, she said that if she had no one to call, she’d have either paid her way through or had her time severely wasted.
“If I succumbed to every attempt to extort me at every post, that would be so much money added to a travel budget that is already stretched. At the end of the day, I paid only 7,000 CFA to the Togo Customs for a laissez-passer, which was the only official payment I was supposed to make,” the caption reads in part.
Ebaide, 33, decided to travel across Africa on a bike after surviving a traumatic car accident at 23.
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