Nigeria’s crumbling education and healthcare systems are increasingly pushing rich nationals to seek dual citizenship in other countries so much so that the world’s largest citizenship advisory and residency firm, Henley & Partners Group, is now considering setting up shop in the country after seeing a big jump in Nigerian clients.
Henley, which is setting up in the country’s commercial capital, Lagos, supports those with deep pockets to secure citizenship of various Caribbean countries, including St. Kitts and Nevis, that allow more widespread visa-free travel, as well as a select few European Union members such as Cyprus and Malta.
Costs range from less than $200,000 for Caribbean passports to a contribution of more than $1 million for European nations. Other clients opt for residency-by-investment programmes offered by countries including the US, the UK and Portugal.
Expressions of interest in either passports or residency rights from Africans have jumped in recent years to more than 1,000 in the first quarter of this year from about 750 a year earlier, according to Henley, with South Africa and Nigeria alone accounting for 85 percent of total interests in 2019.
In explaining the motivation behind opening an office in Nigeria, Dominic Volek, Henley’s head of sales, said the Zurich-based firm had been engaging with Nigerian and West African clients for over three years and has seen constant growth.
“The trend of rich Nigerians seeking opportunities outside Nigeria to gain access to better quality education and healthcare is on the rise and the entry of Henley probably underscores that,” one wealth manager said.
“It’s not a new trend at all. It has, however, been intensified by the coronavirus pandemic which has further exposed Nigeria’s failing social infrastructure,” the person said.
Nigerians spent over $4.55 billion on education tourism alone in 2019, according to CBN data, while health tourism topped $1.9 billion, as Nigerians continue to rely heavily on foreign education and medical tourism amid poor local substitutes.
Nigeria’s educational system is faced with a myriad of challenges that include infrastructural decay, government neglect, waste of resources and ignoble conditions of service. The country has about 13 million out-of-school children. That’s the highest in the world. Another 27 million children in school are performing very poorly. Millions of Nigerians are half-educated, and over 60 million – or 30 percent – are illiterate.
The healthcare system is no better. Bedevilled by a lack of investments, the state of Nigerian health care is so deplorable that even President Muhammadu Buhari travelled to a UK hospital for an ear infection in 2018.
However, while wealthy Nigerians have privileges that help them escape the country’s torrid education and healthcare systems, majority of Nigerians, who live in poverty, are stuck with them.
Nigeria, the largest economy and biggest crude oil producer in Africa, has more than 700 people with a net worth greater than $30 million and that figure is forecast to grow by 13 percent in the next five years, Knight Frank’s 2020 Wealth Report estimates.
The country, which has a population of about 200 million, also has the most people living in extreme poverty anywhere in the world at 89 million, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
The increasing travel limitations of the Nigerian passport are also fast-tracking efforts to obtain dual citizenship.
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 in 2020.
The decline in passport power means Africa’s most populous country ranks 95th – firmly etched in the bottom quarter of the rankings.
The spate of rich Nigerians seeking dual citizenship could be set to rise further following the Donald Trump administration’s move to extend a ban on green cards issued outside the United States until the end of the year and add many temporary work visas to the freeze, including those used heavily by technology companies and multinational corporations.
The administration cast the effort as a way to free up jobs in an economy reeling from the coronavirus.
The ban, while temporary, would amount to major restructuring of legal immigration if made permanent, a goal that had eluded the administration before the pandemic.
