NIGERIA: THE MUMU TRAVEL POPULATION

NIGERIA: THE MUMU TRAVEL POPULATION

@butterflytouris @butterflytourismng.com

 

I have written a lot about how Nigerians are being treated outside our shores by airports immigrations, hotels, tour companies etc and the feeling of helplessness by us and our ‘governments’. There has also been a lot of responses, the summary being our bad PR , how our ‘notoriety’ precedes us, and how there is nothing much we can do because we have been wrongly tagged. My thought: we can reciprocate the gestures to the nationals of these erring countries when they come, tit for tat. That is usually the best revenge in international politics, and in this case. Make no mistake, they are here to make money, and regardless how you treat them, they will still come. Nigerians are great people and the few bad eggs that are also available in other nations should not affect us this much. 

Above is not the reason I am writing this piece. This write up is about how we are being slapped in our ‘backyard’ and we have become a ‘Mumu Travel Population’ MTP in our struggle to get out of our perceived trap of a country.  These ranges from immigration firms in Canada who knew from onset their client will never pass the test of English but collects heavy money. The United State Embassy who makes hundreds of millions everyday denying visa with glee, the Shenghen countries who ask you to buy travel insurance you cannot get your money back when denied, the VFS (Visa application handling firm) who charges you more than the visa fees as administrative fee, make you pay cash and somehow they repatriates all the funds without traces back to India. This is not to mention the many trapped school fees abroad running into billions, as owners are not able to get visa. If you are in my industry, you could breath too deeply and pass away!

I am going to discuss the above travel scams in no particular order.

 If the United State Embassy in Lagos and Abuja handle five thousand application per day, and I tell you they knowingly deny up to 90 per cent applicants without any reason- individuals, families, colleagues etc (I agree they hold the rights to issue visa or not to issue), they would be making two hundred and seventy million Naira (N270,000,000) per day, multiply that by number of working days in a year and your calculator will show E! This cash flow is more than enough to fund the US embassies, and they can repatriate some huge cash back home. The fact that they do not give applicants any reason for not giving visa is showing their hands, they just ask you to reapply and give you hope. Some people in their desperation have applied over seven times (money enough to start a business), before bowing to faith. If our government understands how much is leaving our economy through this pipeline, there should be something they can do about it.

Why is it that the European countries do not prefer you  buy travel insurance on issuance of visa, which then must be sighted at the port of entry?  There is a free approximately five thousand naira per person  insurance scam going on.  Across Nigeria, at least twenty five thousand applicants buy this Insurance everyday for the different European visa application, meaning that we spend about one hundred and twenty five million (N125,000,000) on insurance daily we may never use. The European insurance companies sit pretty and collect free money, who does that! Okay, their Nigerian counterparts make some parts of that too. Can we reciprocate that and help our own insurance sector boom, because huge number of  people get in here daily too!

In the mix is the VFS, the Indian application handling merchant, who cries more than the bereaved. If they handle fifty thousand applications per week with their service charges which is over twenty three thousand per person, it means that they are coasting home weekly with this figure N1,150,000,000, insane isn’t! Please kindly help use your calculator too! They smile and insists on collecting cash every day, how do we tax this correctly? How do we make sure this kind of companies don’t just repatriate all these cash, do they do CSR? 

I am not going to help you add how much is leaving the pockets of Nigerians daily in our bid to travel abroad, either to escape or for genuine business or vacation. The underlined fact here is ‘these people’ have tapped into a mumu travelling nation  whose population don’t care how much they pay to get out and the governments even care less. 

About half of these huge funds could stay back in Nigeria if people who travel abroad decide at least in once in five years to try places in Nigeria. It is easy to quickly deceive ourselves to go into the rhetoric of tourism sites are not well maintained. It is a lie! We don’t like consuming anything from Nigeria until it becomes a fad. Remember the hay days of Obudu and Calabar, yes they were run down finally by the ineptness of  a new government.  Why will people go to Safari in Kenya and refuse to go to Yankari in Bauchi? We all know not many Nigerians will gleefully post their local holiday on social media!

So this write up does not degenerate to ranting, it is high time we attract people to come to Nigeria, just the way we are. They are interested more in our culture and nature and let us sell that. Effectively I have been able to do this with my modest company, maybe with not too much success. We have hotels (a bit overpriced), we have transport companies (bit pricey too), and we have great places they can visit. The Nigeria Tourism Board needs to start talking to travel agents worldwide and linking them up with their Nigerian counterpart to sell destination Nigeria. Other countries have done that with Nigerian travel agents successfully. The black history months to African American, Cubans, Brazilians is a great window, not to mention our many festivals.

Hopefully, this should re awaken Nigerians that they can holiday in Nigeria especially when they start seeing Caucasians too, since they set agenda for us. I look forward to a day, we will keep our funds here, and all these sharks will no longer fish on us as a people and as a country.

Hafees Keshinro is the founder of Butterfly Tourism Nigeria

www.butterflytourismng.com