Britain’s ambassador to Nigeria has again said that the visa bond scheme proposed by the Home Office will affect only a tiny proportion of Nigerians travelling to the UK, reiterating an assurance he made to Nigeria’s Foreign Ministry in July.
Speaking this week to Vanguard, a Nigerian daily newspaper, Dr Andrew Pocock said that the uproar caused in Nigeria and other so-called ‘high risk’ countries targeted by the proposal had been caused by a misunderstanding of what the scheme would entail.
He said:”We know what the Nigerian government thinks about this and we have passed those feelings back to the government in London and they are taking it into consideration”.
According to Dr Pocock, the Nigerian press had misreported the UK’s intentions and, as a result, the Nigerian government and people had become unduly alarmed. He sought to reassure his audience that there was no certainty that the scheme would even be introduced and said that even if it did, it “wouldn’t be so bad”.
Dr Pocock added: “If 150,000 Nigerians travel to the UK every year, this scheme will probably only affect a couple of hundreds…so it’s not a catastrophe coming down the road”. He offered an assurance that he would let the Nigerian government know as soon as a decision is made, adding that even if the pilot is held, there is no certainty that Nigeria will be one of the countries affected.
“So, with the things I’ve said, it is not a policy, we still need to pilot it if it is decided. We don’t know if Nigeria will be affected and even if it is and we are talking very small numbers (..) It is not nearly as bad as it sounds. It doesn’t mean that every Nigerian has to pay £3,000 for a UK visa. It does not mean that,” he said.
Surprisingly little information has come out of Westminster since the controversial plan was put forward in July. Reaction to the proposal in Nigeria, Ghana and India in particular was swift and angry. Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Olugbenga A Ashiru, said that the scheme would be ‘discriminatory’ and would ‘definitely negate’ a proposed bilateral trade deal between Nigeria and the UK.
India’s Trade Minister, Anand Sharma, who was in the UK on a trade visit at the time of the announcement, asked for further clarification from the UK government. He too said that the scheme, if it was introduced, might have consequences for trade between the UK and India.
There have been calls within the so-called ‘high risk’ nations to impose a reciprocal system on British travellers. One has to say that particular horse bolted over 300 years ago when high risk British colonialists usurped whole cultures by draining far-flung lands of their manpower and mineral and social wealth. It is precisely through the travails of the very peoples the British now seek to repel that Britain has anything to offer, having been enriched by the Slave Trade in West Africa; the Raj system in India (which at the time encompassed what we now know as Pakistan and Bangladesh – both also visa bond candidates) and the virtual commandeering of gold, diamond and oil-rich land. There is little doubt that the issue of visa bonds even being considered will remain divisive.
Despite the run-up to Christmas appearing to be a really bad time to complicate the workload of immigration officials, November has been mooted as a possible time for the pilot to commence. However, the Government’s relative silence on the issue has led commentators to speculate that the idea may have been quietly dropped.
