A passport adrift, the owner, a gift

Goodbye passport!

“Please, respect me.” That is what she said from the bedroom where she had sequestered herself, having been seen from the car park barely half an hour earlier by my partner as he picked up a passport that appeared to have been flung out of a window on one of the higher floors of our apartment block.

I know people can be going through a lot of things, unexplainable or inexplicable, but it is impossible to fully understand the issues people face. I say this because it was an utterly bizarre situation.

Brian, on returning to our apartment this afternoon, saw a document land in front of him. He picked it up and realised it was a South African passport. As he examined it, he scanned the façade of the apartment block to see which window it might have come from, and in the corner of one window, he saw a lady; he waved to her, and she waved back. He even waved the passport at her, and she must have been waving goodbye to the passport.

No online footprint

I saw the passport, and it became clear how important the document was; it had a recently obtained Schengen visa with a year’s validity. We thought whoever might have lost that passport would be in turmoil once they realised it was missing. We searched Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and Instagram but found no sign of the person.

If there was ever a time you needed a searchable online presence, it is now. We contacted our apartment landlord to find out how to share information with the residents of the building, and meanwhile, Brian went up to the apartment where he suspected the lady he had waved to was. No one came to the door except a young man claiming to be her brother. It was not definitive enough for us to give him the passport.

No proof of ownership

So, we went back up with him in the hope of confirming that the lady he saw earlier was the rightful owner of the passport, but she refused to come out of her room. However, while we were speaking with her brother, she made the statement quoted at the beginning.

Obviously, as gentlemen, we had no intention of invading her privacy or causing her distress; at the same time, we could not part with the document without a secure transfer to the owner or a responsible authority, such as the facilities management team of the apartment complex. In extremis, we will have to hand the document over to a police station.

The facilities management team suggested we put the passport in their letterbox, but it was insecure; we simply did not have the heart to part with the document that easily.

Consider the reasons

However, it made us question why the lady was not eager to get her passport back and whether she had deliberately thrown it out of the window out of pique or total disinterest in the visa, which had been obtained for her against her wishes.

This brings us back to the idea that people might be experiencing much more than a seemingly great opportunity suggests. Maybe she is afraid of travelling to an unfamiliar place, and I understand how daunting that can be.

Then there are instances of young women being forced into criminal activities, either as victims of human trafficking or acting as drug mules. You can never tell. Losing a passport like that might even save someone from an unimaginable fate at customs or border controls abroad.

Perhaps, the best course of action is to hand the passport over to the police so they can assist her if something suspicious is occurring. We tried to help as considerate Good Samaritans, but found ourselves in a difficult situation, and honestly, just surrendering it to the police seems the simplest solution.

Postscript

We had a torrid night, thinking the worst of the situation that the lady might be under the influence of criminal gangs who might attempt a home invasion to demand the passport, before teaching us an unforgettable lesson.

We also decided to take the passport to the nearest police station in the morning. As I called an Uber cab ride when I stepped into the elevator to see a Frenchman ask if we were in a numbered apartment.

He happened to be the husband, and he showed me the identity card of the lady on his phone. I invited him into the apartment, and as he was narrating his helplessness at the plight of his wife, he broke down.

She had thrown the passport out of the window and had some as yet undiagnosed mental health issues, which her parent attributed to some spiritual gift she has. Well, every gift is under the control of the gifted, that is scripture without equivocation. If your gift controls you, we are a different territory of personality disorder and whatever that entails.

We advised him to seek the best professional and medical help he could find, and he should approach this as a Westerner rather than trying to understand the cultural differences that might handicap him.

Having handed him the passport, we heaved a sigh of relief. On our return home, there was an ambulance in the car park, and we saw the husband in the lift with the medics. We have no idea what might have happened; we just hoped all would turn out right.

From a Nigeria 30 years ago

The outlay

I really thought I will not write a blog today, but Brian said, I could do it and it will be an auspicious thing because it commemorates the day I have not forgotten.

It was a Sunday, the 30^th of December 1990 that I took a delayed flight with Nigeria Airways from Lagos to London and that was my departure from Nigeria. Things moved quite quickly in the space of 7 or so weeks.

I was a partner in a desktop publishing firm we called NextStep Limited when we decided on updating our equipment by making a trip to the United Kingdom. The activity would have been performed by a former business partner of the principal, but at the last minute, I was added to the trip, somewhat to protect our interests.

The situation

On the 18^th of November, I had arrived in England for a business trip that was to last a week, however, that stretched to two weeks because some of the kit we had acquired was to be delivered later than our previously scheduled stay. That night, Chris Eubank beat Nigel Benn in a boxing match.

That former business partner once worked for Nigeria Airways and knew his way around, all the VAT returns for our purchases of over £4,000 went into his UK account. Laden with our kit, I returned to Nigeria on the 2^nd of December, by which time John Major had supplanted Margaret Thatcher.

Whilst in the UK, I learnt that I had the skills for a thriving computer technical support market if I ventured the idea, I got a copy of my long birth certificate as it was not obtained my parents when they got the short version. With that in hand, I applied for the Certificate to the Right of Abode which only had a 3-week processing time compared to the 18-month waiting list for a British passport.

The execution

The interview was a breeze, more the exchange of banter about failed interviews and with my special visa to hand, I bought my one-way ticket to London for the price of NGN 3,200. I was ready to go even if very few believed my plans would be executed. I had determined I was going to leave before 1990 was over.

My 25^th birthday was given prominence at the Christmas party for the staff of Deji Sasegbon Publishers, a legal publishing outfit for which I was a consultant and through whom I had the bulk of my airfare to travel to the UK, as part of our contractual agreement signed some 14 months before.

The memory

The exchange rate then was NGN 15 to £1 and though I have left for a generation, Nigeria has not left me, I am impacted and affected by many things in Nigeria, most completely out of my control by inimical policies that take no consideration for the people. I cannot report that things have improved for the majority even as some have prospered.

On the matter of returning, even for a visit, I am undecided, and the passage of time has made it quite unlikely regardless of the event or the occasion, I think and dream of Nigeria, it is not home, just a place of memories, attachments, and influence. My hope is still that Nigeria finds peace and prosperity and hopefully at the hands of people who know what they are doing and will not squander the rare opportunities to do so.

My boarding pass from the 30^th of December 1990.

Nigeria: Don't let your passport be handled like junk mail

A few weeks ago, a Nigerian citizen vandalised many vehicles around the offices of the Nigerian High Commission in London out of frustration with their poor customer service practices, not excusable, but understandable. [Punch]

In reaction to that event, the Nigerian High Commission in London has released a poorly written notice on their website that invalidates the use of third parties or electronic booking systems for applying for Nigerian passports.

Nigerian High Commission in London

However, there is one requirement that I cannot ignore, written in their own words, “applicants are required to submit pre-paid self address special delivery envelop on completion of bio-metric capturing.”

A passport is a critical identity document that cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, there must be a chain of custody from when a passport leaves the Nigerian High Commission to when the recipient verifiably receives it.

They can employ a low-cost postal option with next-day delivery, secure, signed for with proof of delivery or returned to the sender, all this with tracking and tracing along with knowing where the responsibility lies if the document is lost. Introducing a parallel insecure archaic service does not cut it and this idea should be stopped before more damage is done to the literally irretrievable bad reputation of this rotten bureaucracy.

I advise the Nigerian High Commission to avail themselves of this service and hope the staff would at the very least stop behaving like they are impervious to using systems that work.

This is what the Royal Mail does - Royal Mail Signed For® 1st Class

Thought Picnic: Living without an identity for 4 hours

I’m impressed

Despite the sometimes negative reports about tardy and inefficient passport processing activities at the government establishment that has gone through too many name changes for me to be bothered anymore, my three visits to the Home Office – Identity & Passport Service (IPS) have left me with no reason to complain.

In fact, the first was not a visit but it was when I changed my Nigerian passport for a British passport decades ago.

Time and cost

I decided against getting a British passport in Nigeria because the waiting time was 18 months though it would have cost me less than a fifth of what it costs to get the Entitlement to the Right of Abode (ERA) in my Nigerian passport but a waiting time of 3 weeks – I was planning on leaving Nigerian in 4 weeks.

For a few years, I got by with using my Nigerian passport in the UK until when returning from a visit to the Netherlands, the two of us Nigerian ERA passports became vectors of abuse because at the French customs held onto our passports for 90 minutes whilst they wondered if we were British enough to return home or not – that did it for me.

Quick and efficient

After a bit of procrastination, I filled in the forms and posted all the documents required on a Tuesday in London, by Saturday the letter dropped through my letterbox with a British passport – no interviews, no delays just efficiency – I was both shocked and surprised whilst glad I did not have to visit every embassy on God’s own earth to travel.

10 years later, I was living in the Netherlands and we are supposed to carry some form of identification with us at all times, though in the almost 13 years that I lived in the Netherlands, I never once was stopped in the streets to show my papers.

In fact, after 5 years of living in the Netherlands, you do have the option to chuck in whatever passport you have for a Dutch one. In my case, having a British passport does get you into more countries by default than any other passport.

Away from home

Again, I filled in the forms, visited the consular office in Amsterdam and was advised to return to pick up the new passport in 3 days despite the fact that old one had expired for weeks.

The only difference with this passport was that it had a Dutch issuing office but that seemed to faze one Dutch immigration clerk and I was left aghast at his ignorance.

In any case, my passport was to expire in November, but because of my travels, certain visas require I have at least 6 months left to run on my passport.

Time and cost again

I thought it best to consider renewing my passport before the summer holiday season when the passport office seems to be swamped with applications from travellers who have left it too late to get a passport with their holidays at the risk of being forfeited – I cannot live with that kind of stress.

The passport office offers a number of services for passport renewal, Premium 1-day service (4-hour turn-around), the Fast Track 1-week service or the normal service which could take up to 3 weeks or more.

You can trust that I weighed the consequences of time and cost like I did decades ago in Nigeria and I went for the Premium 1-day, which came to a fraction less than the cost of the normal service.

Village photographs on city forms

Whereas the normal service can be done through the post with some post offices offering and check-and-send service, the other two services require you visit a regional Identity & Passport Service office – working in North Wales, the nearest for my convenience was Liverpool.

What surprised me was my local post office in North Wales did not stock the passport forms, I had to visit a major city to pick up the forms, the first of which I made a mistake on, the second was wrongly guillotined and I finally decided on getting two forms and filling them separately at different times to minimise error.

Then for regulation photographs to go with my passport, the Chinese photographer who took the first set of pictures had me looking the palest shade of sick, I needed to try another photographer; that set was more vibrant in colour and after getting a few opinions, I decided on that set.

The essence of presence

I booked an appointment for a week in advance for 10:00AM in Liverpool and made sure my hotel was as close to the office as I could get.

We were not to arrive at the IPS office earlier than 10 minutes to the appointed time, I was there on-time, passed through security, checked-in at the reception and my ticket was called with 5 minutes – the checks took less than 5 minutes, I paid for the service and was asked to return in 4 hours for the new passport.

The collection time as set as 14:05 from the counter and that was to coincide with 4 hours from the moment payment was made.

New passport

I did return at a few minutes past 2:00PM and the security personnel observed that I had changed from a red tie to a white-speckled black day cravat – my passport was ready.

I was only without an identity document for 4 hours, it makes you wish other agencies like this for other countries were just as efficient, maybe I should resist the temptation of mentioning Nigeria – Sorry, I did.

I forgot to mention, the months left to run on my old passport were added to my new 10-year passport, you are allowed up to 9 months.