Nigeria might be Africa’s largest economy but it is increasingly home to one of the continent’s weakest passports.
Over the past decade, the Nigerian passport has suffered the worst decline in rankings on the annual Henley Passport Index with a 19-place drop. The decline in passport power now sees Africa’s most populous country rank 95th—firmly etched in the bottom quarter of the rankings. The drop in rankings also means Nigerian passport holders can visit two countries fewer now than they could in 2010 without first obtaining a visa.
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According to the Act establishing it, the Nigeria Immigration Service has as its core mandate: control of persons entering or leaving Nigeria; issuance of travel documents to bonafide Nigerians in and outside Nigeria; issuance of residence permits to foreigners in Nigeria; and border surveillance and patrol.
In theory, the NIS is supposed to issue fresh passports to applicants within 48 hours; re-issuance (or renewal) takes 72 hours after enrolling for biometric data capture, which takes an unspecified length of time. But in practice, things are completely different, an unpleasant experience for the majority of applicants who go through excruciating delay.
This manifests in open touting or the deliberate use of “agents” by NIS officers, and lengthy queues at passport offices. Rowdiness and long queues define the places, among other ills. The bottleneck fuels bribery, allowing NIS officers to rip off or wring bribes from desperate applicants, who are made to pay between N25,000 and N27,000 or more, instead of the official price of N17,000 (32 pages) or N22,000 (64 pages). Officers solicit money to issue passport to applicants through the use of agents.
According to Quartz Africa Weekly Brief, regionally, Africa accounts for four of the seven biggest drops in ranking on the index since 2010. Keeping with the historical trends, the region also dominates the bottom quarter of the rankings with only two countries—Seychelles and Mauritius—in the top 50.
In some cases, passport power is affected by local conflict and security fears as seen in the cases of Libya which has dropped 16 places since 2010 and Mali which has dropped 13 places. But, generally, the decline in the power of African countries is largely because countries in other regions are easing travel with reciprocity and boosting the strength of their passports at a much faster pace.
While Henley & Partners, the residence and citizenship consultancy that collates the index, notes a “substantial increase in the number of countries an average individual can visit without needing to get a visa in advance,” it also admits much of the progress on this front is firmly skewed towards holders of passports of developing countries. As such, the firm says the current global mobility gap is the “starkest” ever since the inception of the index.
Without the luxury of visa-free travel or even receiving visas on arrival, travelling abroad comes with the hurdle of expensive, paperwork-intensive visa application processes for a majority of holders of African passports. But most applications are likely to be met with rejection—sometimes without just cause: a joint All-Party Parliamentary Group report from British lawmakers in August showed Africans are being unfairly denied UK visas.
The real-life implications of difficult visa processes for Africans range from being unable to visit family members abroad to scuttling higher education plans. Up to 75% of African students who applied for study permits in Canada between January and May 2019 were rejected— far higher than the global rejection rate of 39%.
One easy way for African countries to boost the strength of their passports is by easing visa regimes on the continent. Yet, progress in easing travel between African countries remains slow-moving: 49% of countries on the continent offer neither visa on arrival nor visa-free travel to other African visitors.
