Your passport dictates how you are treated. But it can be reversed, argues JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
Take two men and a plane ticket. The first is an American or a Canadian who, some years ago, served time in prison. A convicted felon. Yet if he wakes tomorrow and decides to holiday in Rome, the only thing between him and the trip is a booking website. No embassy asks him to explain himself. No official weighs his worthiness. His passport does the vouching.
The second man is Aliko Dangote, or Abdulsamad Rabiu, or any Nigerian of comparable standing you care to name. Before either of them can even think about that same Roman holiday, the first question is whether a Schengen visa already sits in the Nigerian passport. If it does not, the holiday becomes a project. Weeks must be set aside. A small mountain of documents must be assembled: bank statements, letters of employment or, in their case, proof of empire, hotel reservations, return tickets, insurance, an itinerary, all to persuade a consular officer that these men can be trusted to enter Europe and, above all, to leave it again. Africa’s most accomplished industrialists must audition for a permission a felon from Ohio never has to seek.
I have used Europe as the illustration, but do not mistake the example for the rule. The same wall stands around almost the entire world. Swap Rome for New York, London, Johannesburg, Ottawa, Tokyo or Canberra and the story barely changes. Swap Dangote for a doctor from Dhaka, an engineer from Nairobi, a lawyer from Lima or a teacher from Manila, and it does not change at all. This is not a Nigerian grievance. It is the shared condition of most of the global south, where the citizen of a poor country must negotiate a gauntlet of visas, fees, interviews and suspicion to enter a rich one, while the citizen of a rich country crosses the earth on a booklet and a booking. The irony is that countries of the global south have mimicked these walls against themselves whilst throwing their gates open for those who defined the norm. A double tragedy.
This tells you how the world is actually organised. The felon and the billionaire are not judged on their lives. They are judged on their origin: where you were born, and what that birthplace is presumed to be worth.
The world was built by those with the tools to set the rules, and they set them to restrict the ordinary citizen of the global south. The rules do not distinguish between us. They group us. They flatten the professor and the fraudster, the surgeon and the stowaway, into one suspect category defined by the cover of a booklet. Your life’s work does not matter. Only your nationality does, and it has already been scored, filed, and, in most consular back offices, quietly treated as a flight risk.
We can recite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights until we are hoarse. It says everyone has the right to leave any country and return to his own. A beautiful sentence, and for the holder of a Nigerian, Kenyan, Bangladeshi or Bolivian passport, largely theoretical, because the right to leave your country means little when no other is obliged to let you in, and the ones you most want to visit assume you plan to overstay. Whatever the declarations say on paper, one thing is clear in practice. These countries do not rate us, and a passport is only a nation’s promise about its people. To distrust the document is to distrust the citizen.
The same nations that lecture us about openness have made themselves the most closed places on earth for people who look like us. That is true, and none of it changes a single visa decision. The consular officer is not moved by our sense of injustice. The gap in mobility is not an argument we win by being right about it. It is a gap in power, and gaps in power do not close because you complain about them. They close when you build power that makes them impossible to sustain.
So the useful question is not how dare they. It is what this teaches us about where we stand. The passports that open doors belong to countries the world needs, whose economies, institutions and citizens others cannot do without. It goes to nations too productive, too stable and too important to be waved into the queue. The strength of your passport is a scoreboard of your country’s power, and we read our own low score every time we assemble those documents.
Most of the work is work at home. A Nigeria, or any southern nation, whose institutions worked, whose economy grew year on year, whose citizens were plainly building rather than fleeing, would in time change the assumption that governs those consular desks. Visa-free travel tracks almost exactly with prosperity and good governance.
If the global north has decided to group us together whatever our merit, let us take that same logic of grouping and turn it to our own use. An African passport that lets an African move freely across Africa? A market big enough that our own continent is worth staying in? Regional institutions that make our movement our own decision rather than another capital’s favour? These we have the power to build. We cannot legislate our way into the north’s good opinion. We can build homes so worth living in that its opinion matters less every year.
The ticket the felon buys without a second thought is a free lesson, and the lesson is simple. The world respects power and prices everything else. The answer is not to protest the ranking but to change the numbers. That work is slow, unglamorous, the work of a generation, and it is entirely ours. It starts with seeing the order for what it is and refusing to accept that our place in it is fixed forever. One study by the LAGO Collective puts the loss to applicants from developing regions at157 million euros per year on rejected, non-refundable short-term Schengen (EU) visas. Reverse remittances. Tragic.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing