Well it’s not over til the fat lady sings but after spending 9 hours at immigration on Monday (31st Jan) staring at people doing nothing staring at us doing nothing, without passports and being told to exercise patience, we eventually left (at 6pm) once everyone had gone home (home time being in the air from about 2:30 after having literally done nothing all day and were told to return the next morning.
Without exaggerating, we sat in an office with 11 people and 4 of them did absolutely nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing but either sleep, stare, stare some more or page through the same couple of pages of the paper, the others might have stamped the odd passport, it was actually rather fascinating).
Do not take this route into Nigeria!
Tuesday we arrived armed with snacks and books to read (as we were obviously offered nothing the day before) and again we sat an entire day in waiting rooms waiting for we weren’t sure what, catching a glimpse of our ‘file’ that got bigger and bigger with more and more reports and notes written into it. No questions were allowed and obviously no pressure from us as you just can’t rock the boat. Somewhere, in the lower ranks, there was a MAJOR misunderstanding and with a mixture of complete incompetence, arrogance and broken telephone, our matter had ended up with the Head Controller of the Immigration Services, “Madame” who now wanted to see the file.
By now we had even managed to win some high ranking officers onto our side and having had an apology for the misunderstanding and an acknowledgement that it is not our fault if there are roads on the map that are not patrolled, we were still getting nowhere.
Late Tuesday now, it was agreed by Head of Operations that we would be escorted out of the country by an official (called Controlled Exit) once we had been accompanied to the Angolan and Cameroonian Embassies. So off we went again this morning to Immigrations (which is almost 40km away I might add!) and were preparing ourselves for another day of little progress. But we only waited about an hour and were assigned 2 officers to escort us. Already this is ridiculous as essentially if we were such a risk, we should never have been allowed out of anyone’s sight, but it’s clear that the mistake has been on their side but with all the commotion and senior involvement, there was no backing down and the process needed to seem rather formal.
So off we went to go get 2 visas in the next hour and begin our controlled exit with 2 surly officers treating us as if we were human traffickers by refusing to communicate at all. And guess what, you can’t just crack the whip and get 2 visas for other countries in an hour, surprise surprise!!! And we need to follow the normal process which was apply today for Angola and collect on Monday! So all that’s happened so far is that we have been kept in the country longer than we would have been in the first place. Whilst driving there, I managed to catch a few glimpses of our endless handwritten reports and figured out why the high ranking officer who was eventually on our side was laughing at our report and admitted that we were clearly being used as a punching bag as apparently the South African Embassy is messing with Nigerians at the moment. Still not sure how making an example of us was going to get back to the SA embassy.
Anyway, so the first section of the report specifies which Section of which Act of which Year blah blah we contravened and that we had already been in the country illegally for 3 days – which of course is not true as we had visas. The next section was a specific request “seeking approval for further interruption of journey and final repatriation of the couple” – approved! Ah hah, so go ahead and see how long their patience lasts…..ok, you win, this is a very silly game….The next section had something about how we were misled by Kontagora and that the border was in fact not manned. Thereafter, another report suggesting that officers assist us in getting visas and the last one I managed to read specified who.
View of Mosque from Sheraton Campsite and morning wake-up call
So that’s where we are, 10 days at the Sheraton Camp Grounds instead of 5, and we are sure that they could not be bothered to actually escort us out the country personally. In fact, not long into our travels today with our escorts, when it was clear we were not criminals, we were showing them on the map where we were going, got invited to the one guy’s wedding later this year, were told that immigration was clearly messing in our affairs and we would be given a letter for the border which would also quickly get us through any police stops so that our journey wasn’t interrupted any further – go figure! We didn’t even need to take our escorts back to the office as we offered to pay for a taxi for them and after a call to the office “to confirm finalization of their assignment – sir!”, we went on our way….we even got to the point of familiarity of sharing a bottle of peanuts.
But the fat lady has not yet sung and we have to report back to immigration once visas are complete for our final direction on which border we exit etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment