Barely a week after the Embassy and Consulate of the United States of America in Nigeria suspended the interview waiver “Drop Box”, application for the US visa has taken a tougher turn, especially with applicants getting long visa appointment dates.
The US Embassy and Consulate in Nigeria suspended the “Drop Box” application process effective May 14, 2019, stating that “all applicants in Nigeria seeking a nonimmigrant visa to the United States must apply online, and will be required to appear in-person at the US Embassy in Abuja or US Consulate General in Lagos to submit their application for review”.
While the suspension has meant that Nigerian applicants seeking visa reissuance under the B1/B2, F, M, L and H visa classes are no longer guaranteed visas across the above classes, these applicants are even faced with a much tougher challenge of getting favourable visa appointment dates.
Some applicants who were at the Embassy and Consulate recently noted that their visa appointments dates were stretched months after their planned trip to the US, which implies that the event or programme they seek visa to attend in the US would have come and gone before their appointment is due.
An applicant who requested to remain anonymous noted that he was given eight months appointment for a visa he needs for an internship programme in October. The intrigue for him is that the event would have taken place months before the visa appointment in January 2020.
The long appointment dates are not good for applicants who have genuine reasons to seek visas, said Bankole Bernard, president, National Association of Nigeria Travel Agencies (NANTA).
Bernard believes that instead of giving applicants unrealistic dates, it was better to inform them when to apply and avert the apprehension that comes with the thought of missing a trip or business appointment in the US because of visa, which could be denied at the interview too.
For him, the US treatment to Nigerians on the visa issue is not fair because Nigerians go to America to spend their money on holiday, education, business, corporate/training purposes, among others. He insisted that there are better mechanisms the US Embassy and Consulate can devise rather than making people go through the long wait for an appointment.
Citing the example of the Rwanda-South Africa visa imbroglio, he said the US Embassy and Consulate in Nigeria should look for a win-win platform for the applicants and the visa issuing authority.
“If you can recall, recently Rwandans applied to South Africa to attend a show in South Africa and the South African High Commission denied them visa and they said to themselves that they were going to boycott all South African events, companies and products. South Africa had to call them back to a meeting. I believe that when we start to take some stand as these, they will take us seriously,” Bernard said.
Maurice Ocheme, a travel and immigration expert, said the suspension of drop-box was a deliberate move by the US to limit Nigerians that get visa.
“They want to look good so they can claim they did not reject people visa. For diplomatic cases, if you reject visa, you have to give evidence of how. So, what they want to do is to reduce the number of people that apply so that nobody is going to accuse them of rejecting visa,” Ocheme said.
“By removing drop-box, everybody has to apply, so they will reduce the number of visas they treat in a day and reduce the number of people that work on the visa. At the end of the day, they will successfully reduce the number of visas they issue to Nigerians to maybe 50,000 in a year as against maybe 300,000,” he said.
Angela Agbo, an outbound tour operator, said the ultimate plan is to reduce the number of Nigerians that visit America.
“I think it is all about experiment and will not last because the backlog is really piling up, and may need extra staff and work during weekends to sort out,” she said.
But a close source at the US Embassy in Abuja said the long dates are not an issue because of the backlog of applications, especially in the Lagos Consulate.
“Before the drop-box suspension, which took effect from May 14, 2019, applicants have been getting long appointment dates because a lot of people are on the queue. I think that people should not make something out of this because the visa process has to be followed. Applicants with emergencies can also check if there are provisions to appeal and do so if necessary than circulating uninformed stories,” the source said.
OBINNA EMELIKE & IFEOMA OKEKE
