When I read on social media last week that the cost of procuring a six-month visa to the United Kingdom was N410,000, I was alarmed. Almost half a million naira for a visa to make the shortest possible trip to London!
By the time you add more than a million for economy air ticket, the cost would be heading to N2 million to make a dash to London! Ahhhhh, these colonialists aren’t done with us yet!, I fumed. One now has to sell property to make a trip to London.
It may seem normal to some, to incur such expenses, but if you know where I’m coming from, you will understand my outrage.
In the early 1980s when I was at the University of Lagos, Unilag, Nigerians and other Commonwealth citizens needed no visa to the UK. You simply had your entry stamped on arrival. There was a Nigeria Airways office in the Faculty of Education side of the university where one could get a rebate ticket to London for about N60. It wasn’t cheap then, but rich students paid that to attend parties in London.
Now, check out the distance between zero and almost half a million for a visa that hangs on probability (for it could be denied), and you would understand my sense of outrage.
But by training, I try to crosscheck things. I tried to crosscheck this, and the answer I got was significantly less. The UK government website listed the cost of a six-month visa as £115 and the exchange rate till end August was N2,220. Speculatively inflationary as this rate is (still about N2,150 in the black market), the visa fee amounts to N255,300.
All the same, how long will it take before the visa fee crosses the half million naira point, I reasoned. At the rate we are going, it won’t be news if we get there early next year. So, I kept my hiss short, saving the extended version for the near future. It shall certainly come sooner than later, as far as President Tinubu keeps his direction.
Even before we get there, how comfortable are we paying N255,000 for a visa? University professors who have genuine needs to visit London for research don’t earn that much in a month. The amount is more than thrice the new minimum wage that has just been agreed (or are the poor barred from travelling?) Be reminded that some visa applications would be turned down. Some 80 percent of Nigerian applications are granted, according to reports. The 20 percent turned down include indigent citizens that had scraped for months to save up the visa fee.
It’s already bad for us and is set to get worse.
Shall we really blame the British for that? Not in good faith. Over the past 13 years or so, the fee for the UK visa has remained fairly constant and virtually all the changes witnessed here had been caused by the plummeting naira exchange rate. The last time I went that way, in 2011, the fee was in the neighbourhood of £100. Just last year, before Tinubu took over, the fee, in naira terms, was less than half of what it is today.
If Tinubu had a secret agreement with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund before coming to power, it has remained a top secret and he is carrying out their programme with apostolic zeal. Since we haven’t seen them here nor heard their voices in the matters of the removal of petroleum subsidy and the floating of the naira, we must assume that these are homegrown programmes. The devastating effects of these have been resounding, the visa fee being one of them. Isn’t this a self-inflicted injury?
Full circle with the CFA franc
In my early days in West Africa, in the late 1980s, I had this private joke that I would certainly be a millionaire, either in naira or at worst in the CFA franc. That was in the early days of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and the exchange rate of the naira to the dollar was still less than 50. A few notes of naira then commanded a basketful of CFA franc. Thus, it was so easy to be a millionaire in the francophone currency.
Less than 15 years ago, I went to Ouidah, in Benin Republic, to cover the Voodoo festival. After the magical spectacles at the Point of No Return, I returned to Cotonou, the commerce capital. Walking down the streets of John Quette that evening, some of the prostitutes standing in front of the hotels there called out to me to come ‘have some fun’ for ‘small money’. They were almost all Nigerians. I recognized them, just as they recognized and called me, a Nigerian man.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I asked one of them the going price. A thousand CFA, she announced to me. I did the conversion and it came to about N300. I wondered why a young lady would leave Nigeria to go over there and sell her body for just N300. That was before I knew about tramadol and marathon sex.
While checking out the exchange rate that the British work with for visa fees, I saw Niger right atop Nigeria and the rate was CFA 810 to the pound sterling. I did the naira to CFA exchange and saw that a thousand naira is now just CFA 374.5. We have now come full circle from a situation where CFA 1,000 exchanged for about N300 to one in which the naira and the CFA have switched places! And our leaders have no shame!
Now, you know where to find some of your daughters that have left home without adequate qualifications for Europe and the Americas. The near-abroad provides some forex advantage too.
I am tempted to spit on the naira. But common sense tells me to rather spit on the leaders who have brought the innocent currency to this sorry pass.
Ojukwu-Enendu is a former newspaper editor, and can be reached through: [email protected]
