Burkina Faso and Niger will exchange 18 towns to settle a long-running border dispute and end years of litigation. Burkina Faso will gain 14 towns, and Niger will receive four between May 2015 and the end of 2016, when the drawing of the boundary is complete, said Kouara Apiou Kabore of the Burkina Faso National Border Commission.
Niger and Burkina Faso, which were French colonies before independence in 1960, share a border of nearly 1,000 kilometers, about a third of which has been mapped. The rest of the border, which both countries have contested, was redefined in a 2013 decision from the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
That ruling ordered the exchange of vast swaths of territory, with 786 square kilometers handed to Burkina Faso and 277 square kilometers to Niger. The countries in 2015 agreed to implement the decision.
Once the territory has been exchanged, authorities will perform a census in the affected areas, and locals will be allowed to choose which nationality they would like to hold, Apiou said. “They will have five years to make their choice,” she said.
Niger’s justice minister and government spokesman Marou Amadou said the borders dated from 1926. “The borders were drawn by non-Africans,” Amadou said. “Now we have settled this.”
Burkina Faso has more than 3,000 kilometers of frontier with Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Togo. About a third of those boundaries need to be demarcated, authorities said. Discussions with Côte d’Ivoire have begun over a new common border, Apiou said.