I WAS greatly relieved reading that going to London would no longer be as easy as ABC, or like going from Onitsha to Owerri. I want to sincerely thank the British government for being very thoughtful; for making it a rule for Nigerians to invest in some bonds before entering UK. My only problem is that the proposal is not comprehensive. To restrict the bond to only first time visitors to UK is counter-productive. It means the rest of us, especially governors, civil servants and the burgeoning colony of political aides who are in a better stead to defray the three thousand pounds bond will be allowed to move in and out of UK just like that.
This is why I do not like the British approach. They do not know how to make laws. They are applying the same method they applied close to 200 years ago, when they were searching for colonies in West Africa and elsewhere. With all their claims to development, the British have not advanced beyond the application of indirect rule and I cannot understand why. Instead of making a more useful and direct rule that will restrict the movement of public officers in Nigeria, they are chasing shadows with a bond rule that will punish innocent people who are genuinely seeking to breathe fresh air outside Nigeria. That, to me is human rights abuse.
For instance, will this bond rule stop the governors from living almost permanently in UK and elsewhere in the Western world? It is like these oyibo people do not even know that some Nigerian governors have more airtime flying around the world than the busiest British Airways pilot has. Sincerely, I cannot see the point that David Cameron wishes to make here. If the intention is to raise some good money to put the British economy on the same pedestal with the Germans, then he should come straight so that he can have the benefit of good counsel. There are consultants in town who understand these issues better and can create a workable template for the government of Her Imperial Majesty in this direction.
Why should the British authorities be talking of a paltry 3000 pounds when they could conveniently calibrate the bond to create a distinction between ordinary and extra-ordinary seekers of British visa? I mean something like this: first time visitors including students – 3000; renewal or fresh procurement for local government councillors – 50,000; local government chairmen – 100,000; state legislators – 200,000; commissioners – 200,000; House of Reps Members – 750,000; Senators – 1,000,000; ministers and heads of parastatals – 1,500,000 and governors and their deputies and members of their families – 3,000,000. The President and his vice in line with international protocol should be liberated from all diplomatic encumbrances. But Mama Patience Jonathan should be captured on the list and made to pay the same bond as state governors.
To maximise the gains, the British should adopt the model of the Chinese embassy in Nigeria. The Chinese understand the visa economy better. They issue their visa, mainly to Igbo traders in piecemeal of three or six months only, without regard to frequency of visits to China by the passport holder. These traders who are always travelling to China for genuine business are compelled by that policy to visit the consular section of the embassy every six months or thereabout to pay good money to secure a renewal. And often, it is not as simple as walking up there, pay the official fee and await the issuance of a visa. There is a Nigerian content even in Beijing and often, the surest road to China is through Nigerian middle men who charge between N200, 000 to N300, 000 for just visa renewal. The fellows are good; they do not disappoint. An applicant gets the stuff at the appointed date and time without issues once all conditions regarding payment and amount to be paid have been met.
But the China story is stuff for another day. For now, let us discuss seriously how the British government can make more money that it badly needs to do things back home, including servicing the royal family. To make the formula less complex and more fruitful, I suggest that Cameron and his team should apply the comparative advantage theory propounded long ago by a Briton called David Ricardo. The theory says instead of a wild goose chase here, there and everywhere, nations should direct productive energies at areas where returns on efforts would be more than proportionate.
Same way, instead of wasting the British scarce resources tracking down Nigerian first time visitors to Britain for a paltry £3000, the authorities should refocus for the new challenges by instructing the consular section in Nigeria to migrate immediately to the Chinese Visa Model. The British policy, which allows immigrants, in the best-case scenario, a generous 10-year visa life span is not business-like. Secondly, the bond should be limited to governors, ministers and senators. This done, we can now go ahead to enlarge the assumptions and say each of the 36 Nigerian governors would, all things being equal, renew their entry visas to Britain every quarter or four times a year.
At £3million per renewal, each governor will pay £12million annually to the British government and 36 governors and their deputies will pay £12 times 72. It adds up to £864million. That sounds more like it than this three, three, thousand business they are planning to chase up and down. And that is only from the Nigeria Governors’ Forum. If the arithmetic is stretched to the National Assembly, each of the 109 senators will pay a visa bond of £4million annually and a total of £436million for all senators. The 39 ministers will add £234million to the British treasury. We can also do a very conservative estimate and say others not specifically mentioned will jointly pay a total of £500million yearly to get their British visa. Altogether, we would be talking of something above two billion pounds.
Converted to the soft naira, it is approximately N500 billion, enough to pay the subsidy money of one or two petroleum importers. The amount is also enough to pay all the British parliamentarians, maintain robustly the monarchy, including Prince William, his wife and their unborn baby for one year and there will still be change to do other things such as global shuttles by David Cameron to preach gay rights outside Britain.
Yet, instead of thinking seriously in this direction the British are reaching for peanuts as if they are also monkeys. They must learn to up their game. They are too conservative for the modern world. It is this unwillingness to detach from their old ways that is making them lag behind in a number of the things in Europe. Perhaps, they still see the British Empire as where the sun rises and never sets. Sorry, that empire is long defunct. Whatever is not achieved between sunrise and sun set within contemporary Britain is better forgotten. That imperial claim to boundlessness is anachronistic in modern contexts and the British must start to invent more creative ways of appropriating other people’s resources for their own good.
Anyway, the resources of Nigeria, as it was in the colonial days, are available for the grabs. In the specific matter of the visa bond, the British know what they are doing. Too many Nigerians are struggling to reach UK by whatever means and some experts in London must have seen in this mad passion an opportunity to enhance the British treasury. It is excellent thinking if you ask me. I hear Abuja is threatening a retaliatory policy. That is where I am worried because it is not the right way to go about this matter. I mean, £3000 is nothing to the colony of desperados who want to escape from the suffocation that is Nigeria and if some self-serving government officials in a false show of nationalism make matters worse for the escapees, I cannot foreclose the consequences here.
Meanwhile, without sounding immodest, I have offered options in this article that will help both sides. It is top class consultancy service. International best practices allow for 10 per cent service charge in transactions such as this. If I have a tenth of two billion hard British pounds, which translates to £200million, I will order Boeing or any other aircraft manufacturer to deliver a private jet at my doorstep within 24 hours. The balance is more than enough for me to overwhelm the system and emerge as the governor of my state in 2015. I may even decide to take a shot at the presidency, because I can adequately match Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP in a neighbour-to-neighbour campaign.
But I am letting all of that to go for good reason. My 17-year old daughter who is at the International School, Ibadan preparing for what they call Cambridge Matriculation (I guess it is the equivalent of Nigeria’s former Higher School Certificate) has dropped a hint to advance to the actual Cambridge. I am praying for her and I have also asked her to work hard for excellent grades. I do not want a threat to this ambition and the ambitions of thousands of other young Nigerians by this visa bond regime. I never heard of that before!
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