By mid-2003 Nigerian customs revenue losses to the Cotonou–Lagos transit trade had become a strategic preoccupation of the Obasanjo administration. Banned imports — frozen poultry, used clothing, second-hand vehicles in excess of fifteen years, sachet water imports, refined petroleum smuggled westwards in defiance of subsidy economics — entered Nigeria almost entirely overland through the Seme, Idiroko and Owode-Yewa corridor. Stolen Nigerian-registered cars were trafficked in the other direction and re-registered in Porto-Novo.
On 9 August 2003 Customs Comptroller-General Hassan Adamu Bello issued a closure order on the Seme and Idiroko crossings. President Mathieu Kérékou of Benin Republic initially treated the closure as a unilateral Nigerian act. On 14 August 2003, President Obasanjo personally drove to Idiroko, met Customs and Immigration officers at the post, inspected confiscated goods, and addressed a small press contingent at the border line — the first time any Nigerian Head of State had visited a frontier check-point in person to enforce a closure. The image of Obasanjo at the border, in agbada, gesturing across the painted boundary towards Benin Republic, became the defining diplomatic photograph of the year.
Kérékou and Obasanjo met at Badagry the following week; Benin agreed to ban the re-export of frozen poultry and used vehicles above a specified age, to publish a quarterly list of seized Nigerian-registered vehicles, and to harmonise customs hours with Nigeria. The border was re-opened on 25 August. The 2003 standoff is the direct administrative ancestor of the much longer August 2019 – December 2020 Buhari-era land-border closure.