By Rotimi  Fasan
Open letter to the German Ambassador: How Germany underdevelops Nigerian academia

YOUR EXCELLENCY:
I have found it necessary to address this letter to you in view of certain developments at your Lagos Consulate with regard to visa requirements which have very adverse implications for academic practice in Nigeria. I am scheduled to attend a conference at the Cologne African Studies Centre, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne at the end of the month, precisely from May 30 to June 2, 2012.

This is a sponsored conference organised by the African Studies Association of Germany (VAD.e). There are several such associations across Europe and North America. On Monday May 7, I was at your Consular office in Lagos to submit my visa application and be interviewed. As a ‘business visitor’, specifically one going for a conference, I’m not required to book an appointment before appearance at the Consulate for interview.

Other visa applicants in this category are visitors billed for medical check, frequent visitors and others who have visited some designated countries in Europe and America in the recent past. My attendance at this conference has been voided, no thanks to the demand by officials of your Consulate that I book an appointment for the submission of my visa application.

The processes involved in booking an appointment, submission and retrieval of passport, take between four to six weeks which, as I have said, effectively put paid to all my travel plans.

Of course, that waiting period could be considerably shortened if one would go through some of the syndicates operated by touts with connections right inside the Consulate. This is no wild allegation: it’s a fact well known to people in and around your Embassy. When people get tossed around as is often the case by your Embassy staff, it seems it’s an indirect way of referring them to the touts-operated networks around the Embassy.

But while your consulate now insists on prior appointment for visa applications like mine, contrary to the widely-publicised claim on your Embassy website, it makes no attempt to bring this apparent change in policy to the notice of the Nigerian public, especially the academic community and others directly affected by it.

The failure of your Embassy to do this is in conformity with the general disregard with which officials of the German Embassy in Lagos treat their Nigerian clients.

There is no doubt that your Nigerian Embassy must rank among the most profitable around the world, with applicants paying between N12,000 to N13,000 non-refundable visa processing fee every working day of the week whether a visa application is granted or not.

In situation where there is evidence that your Embassy staff make no verification whatsoever before granting or rejecting visa applications (my last application, if it had gone ahead, would have been the second in two years- which is to say I’m sure of my claims), the non-refundable visa fee amounts to a rip-off.

There are yet other instances of gross abuse and disrespect of Nigerians by your Embassy staff even though  a number of these officials are Nigerians, employed more or less like running dogs, to do the bidding of their German bosses who look askance when these Nigerian officials pour some of the most horrible scorn on their Nigerian compatriots- there are, I insist, yet other instances of abuse of Nigerians by your Embassy I would call attention to shortly.

But let us first understand this: To the extent these officials are members of your staff and act apparently under instruction, you bear responsibility for their action. The Nigerian-born official, a bald, aging figure, who is the first point of contact and receives visa applicants every morning at your Lagos Consulate, is a particularly horrible species of these abusers of human dignity at your Embassy.

It is inconceivable, except within the context of the dirty job he was hired for, that such a person, including others like him, could be employed at any institution with any iota of claim to diplomatic training as should be expected of embassy staff. It would be gross understatement to describe Nigerian-born officials at your Embassy in Lagos as rude. They appear specially hired to carry out the ignoble jobs their German employers demand but would rather not be caught doing.

Generally, however, your Embassy staff, German or Nigerian, are discourteous, arrogant and insensitive. They act with caprice and their ways are dour and are evidently subject to how the mood takes them. In a word, they need special training in human relations and diplomatic niceties.

However little the German Embassy may think of Nigeria and Nigerians, there are Nigerian universities that run programmes in these basic aspects of diplomacy and diplomatic engagements and they will be willing, I can assure Your Excellency, to train your embassy officials for fees less than these officials collect each day to process each visa application that comes their way.

There is no doubt that the reflexes and mentality of Western embassy officials have been conditioned to believe that every visa applicant is a potential migrant to the assumedly greener pastures of the West. Theirs is therefore a knee-jerk response to reject all visa applications at first sight, view visa applicants with suspicion or treat them with disrespect. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth.

While it is very true that there are Nigerians who still live under the illusion that life is only bearable when lived in the West, there are many more who think there are far better options to destitution, which is what any extended sojourn outside Nigeria means for increasingly many Nigerians.

Indeed, many Nigerians these days need not have gone beyond the forbidding barricades of gates of many foreign, especially, Western embassies to know what joy it is to live in an environment of love and care in which people still recognise them as human beings. Many life times in Europe and Europe-like climes cannot equate that.

If Nigerian academics must become economic migrants to Europe, it certainly won’t and shouldn’t be in these times when most countries in the Eurozone, from Greece to Spain, are groaning under German-driven austerity, the same bitter pill that has been administered on many countries of the Global South and from which they are yet to recover.

The irony of the present situation in which the West, particularly countries like Germany, closes its doors to migrants from the South shouldn’t be lost on us. This same West, it was, first began the process of looking far beyond its geographical borders for greener pastures.

It is trite history that the whole historiography of capitalism and its manifestation in European imperialism and colonialism rested on its gunpoint invasion and devastation of Africa and other regions of the South.

Continues next week.