Tag: immigration

The dramatic venting out his anger by a temporarily insane Nigerian applicant for a new passport in London U.K. puts in bold relief the problems faced by our diplomatic missions all over the world. Our citizens rightly expect some of their problems to be solved by the representatives of their country in their host countries. Nigerians living abroad have imbibed the culture of the relative efficiency of institutions in their host countries and they expect the dictum that “while in Rome do as the Romans do” to apply to their diplomatic missions.

Most of our people living abroad are not particularly happy people for several reasons. Some are economic migrants looking for better lives in hostile and unwelcoming countries. Many are migrants who got to their various countries of residence illegally. Some reach their destinations claiming to be refugees from whatever African country that was at war with itself at the time of their fleeing the continent. It used to be South Africa, North and South Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe and Zambia or any of the then colonial or settlers dominated countries in Southern Africa or in recent times Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast. Nigerians being very clever people; after settling in the various countries that gave them refuge under false pretences and identities would then saunter into their embassies demanding passports. The immigration attaches would then try to determine their nationality and consequently subject them to the interminable bureaucratic process of verification.

There are also the normal applicants wanting new passports or renewal of the old ones. This should be a straightforward process but they are also subjected to the bureaucratic rigmarole and interminable delay.  These Nigerians no matter how they got to their host countries are operating under intense pressure and tension of racism as well as doing jobs nobody wants just to keep bodies and souls together and also to provide for their families. So at any little “provocation “by the snail-speed of the normal and generally inefficient Nigerian way of doing things, they flare up and become sometimes violent.

The other side of the coin is that sometimes Nigerian missions lack the capacity to respond adequately to our people’s genuine problems. For many months, embassies do not get financial support in terms of annual budget from home and they have to go hungry for months and they cannot tell their Nigerian nationals the state of their country’s affair so that they are not accused of de-marketing and running down their country. Most embassies would like to throw parties and invite their nationals as other countries do but our missions are handicapped in this respect. The annual national and Independence Day celebrations are most times quietly marked. Entertainment is the soul and oil of diplomacy. This is why most countries have reasonable budgets for entertainment. If there were resources, embassy officials would meet at intervals with their nationals to get to know their problems. The shortfall in budgetary allocation leads to all round frustration.

Specifically, the problem of passport issuance is not within the purview of the embassies. This is a matter of a separate – Ministry of Interior (Internal Affairs). Ambassadors have no control over the Immigration Department in the embassies. The embassy merely provides diplomatic cover for immigration officers to do their work. Immigration officers in the embassy are not diplomats. They are attaches and carry no diplomatic passports. But all attaches in the embassies including those of defence, information, education and others defer to the ambassador which means the ambassador is vicariously responsible for any shortcomings of the immigration department of the embassies. The Immigration itself lacks control of its finances unless budgeted for by its headquarters in Abuja. So we have a situation of shortage of passport booklets in all our missions and immigration headquarters have to route their request through the ministry of finance for funding. The request is usually delayed sometimes for a year while poor Nigerians at home and abroad wait interminably for passports. These passports are not printed in Nigeria. Something as simple as passport booklets which should have been printed by the Mint is farmed out to a company in Malaysia or some other country. If it is a matter of security, who says secure documents cannot be fiddled with abroad? Malaysia where I understand Nigerian passports are printed is presently trying its former Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife for embezzlement running into billions of dollars. Fish rots from the head so like prime minister like country. So what is so special about Malaysia that we should be printing our passports in that country? Is it beyond our ken to either print our passports here or empower a local company with security supervision to print our passports in Nigeria?

The present situation where Nigerians abroad have to fight their ways into our embassies to get new passports or renew old ones is not good enough. I have personally seen this ugly situation in Canada, USA and the U.K. Imagine a Nigerian resident in Vancouver in British Columbia flying six or so hours to Ottawa for passport renewal of new passport after securing an appointment with the relevant immigration officials only to get to the embassy to meet the mission closed due to one of our numerous public holidays. Such an applicant would go berserk  because of the inconvenience, the cost of flight and hotel accommodation and  the possibility of he or she  losing his or her job  for being absent from work unduly. Imagine somebody from Texas flying to Atlanta or New York and experiencing the same thing or somebody flying from Aberdeen in Scotland to London and meeting the excuse of no booklets. Recently, people all over Canada were complaining about our High Commission in that country not being open after they had travelled long distances to Ottawa. What was most galling was the fact that the Canadian media gave prominence to their case and obviously to the embarrassment of our country.

We have to do something about this problem. Immigration is a revenue-generating department of government. They make money from issuance of visas and passports as well as work permits for foreign companies doing business in Nigeria. The Nigerian Diaspora which sometimes needs their services and attention are not beggars they are also revenue-generating region for the country. They should be treated with deference and preference like the oil producing Niger Delta. This is because they contribute more than oil to the foreign exchange revenue of our country. Last year, the diaspora, we are told, contributed about $28 billion to the foreign exchange revenue of the country compared to about $20 billion from the oil and gas sector which made a commentator to say what we are running in this country is not an oil economy but a knowledge economy. Our nationals abroad deserve therefore respect from our government. This will be in consonance with the new thinking of the African Union which now recognizes the African Diaspora as a region of Africa equal with the North, East, West and Southern regions of the continent. This thinking should also lead us to treat our diaspora as if it were the Seventh zone in Nigeria in its revenue contribution and he who pays the piper must dictate the tune.

So the way forward to the perennial passport problems particularly in large countries where we have large numbers of Nigerians, such as the United Kingdom, USA, Canada and Germany is to remove the immigration department from the embassies and locate them away from the diplomatic missions, which will then only have to do normal diplomatic business. The separated immigration department will then employ electronic communication  media to reach and communicate with  our nationals abroad including capturing their biometric data and mailing back passports to applicants without their converging in the capital cities where they are resident except when absolutely necessary. The new 10-year expiration of passports would also reduce the volume of people crowding the embassies which in most cases do not have large halls to accommodate the usually surging crowd. On no occasion must any Nigerian, as happened in London recently, get so angry and wired up to the extent of engaging in Luddite action of damaging embassy properties which are the property of taxpaying Nigerians.