Crossing to Benin at Seme: What the Rules Are

• A valid travel document with your photograph on it. In practice that is your passport — Article 3(1) of the ECOWAS free-movement protocol asks for a document issued by or on behalf of your own member state that establishes who you are, with a photograph.
• An international health certificate. Article 3(1) lists one alongside the travel document, even though Benin has stopped checking vaccination cards — both halves of that are below.

Coming back is the easier half: you are a Nigerian citizen returning to Nigeria, and nobody can make your own country a place you need permission to enter. Going out, Benin may still refuse admission to anyone who falls within the categories of inadmissible immigrants under its own law — that is Article 4 of the same protocol, and it is the one limit on the right.

• A valid travel document with your photograph on it, issued by or on behalf of your own member state — your passport. Article 3(1) of the ECOWAS free-movement protocol.
• An international health certificate, which Article 3(1) lists beside it.
• The same documents answer for both directions. You are a Community citizen in Nigeria as well as in Benin, and the ninety days runs in each country separately.

Article 4 of the protocol is the limit worth knowing in both directions: a member state keeps the right to refuse admission to anyone who falls within the categories of inadmissible immigrants under its own laws. That is a decision for the state, taken at the post — it is not a reason for money to change hands at a checkpoint.

• Your passport, and a Benin visa obtained before you travel. The ECOWAS free-movement protocol is a right held by citizens of member states, and it does not reach you.
• Whatever permission brought you into Nigeria has to still be valid when you come back, and valid for a re-entry. Check that before you cross rather than at the barrier.
• An international health certificate is worth carrying, for the reasons set out under the health rule below.

• Nothing beyond your own papers. A passenger is not the person who has to produce vehicle documents, and being asked for them is not a thing the rules contemplate.

The driver has obligations you do not. Under Article 5(2) of the ECOWAS protocol a commercial vehicle carrying passengers may enter and stay in the other country for up to fifteen days on the driver's licence, ownership card or log book, recognised insurance and an international customs carnet, and may not do business there in that time. Those are the driver's papers, not yours.

• A valid driving licence.
• The vehicle's matriculation certificate — the ownership card — or its log book.
• An insurance policy recognised by ECOWAS member states.
• An international customs carnet recognised within the Community.

Those four documents are Article 5(1) of the ECOWAS free-movement protocol, and on them a privately registered vehicle may enter the other member state and remain there for ninety days. What the Nigeria Customs Service wants of your vehicle on the way out and on the way back is a separate question, and one this page could not answer — see what we could not establish, below, and ask at the Customs desk before you drive out rather than after.

• Nothing extra applies to you. The two land-border prohibitions below hold for everybody, load or no load, and they are worth reading once even if you are only visiting family.

• The two prohibitions below apply whatever quantity you are carrying. They are about the route, not the amount: rice and vehicles may not come in through a land border at all.
• How much else you may bring in as personal baggage by land is a figure we could not find published anywhere. It is in the gaps below, with who to ask — and asking before you buy is cheaper than finding out after.

Trading across this border is a bigger subject than one page, and most of it is handled by clearing arrangements rather than by what a traveller carries. This page is about what a person crossing needs to know, so it stops where the formal trade paperwork starts.