Mr. Seyi Olayinka, for three weeks shuttles between Kubwa where he lives and the South Africa embassy in the Central Business district of Abuja for his visa.

Mr. Olayinka was supposed to have started a programme in Business Administration on the 7th of July, 2013 in Durban.
According to him, he still does not know when he would get his visa to finally resume school.

This and many more is what Nigerian visa applicants suffer daily from South African embassy officials.
Even those with official and diplomatic passports, there is no assurance that they get better treatment from the SA embassy officials.

However, Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Jonathan and President Jacob Zuma had earlier this year signed an agreement aimed at ending visa bottlenecks associated with the acquisition of visa by holders of official and diplomatic passports from both countries.

The move was to put an end to lingering issues of visa procurement by citizens of both countries.
Both countries will begin implementing free entry into South Africa and Nigeria for diplomatic and official passport holders.

The waiver was only meant to be a first step in the eventual scheme of things, as there was the need to remove all impediments to the movement of facilitators and agents and promoters of economic relations.

By the agreement, those with blue and diplomatic passport would not need to get visas before they enter South Africa while those with the green passport are expected to get up to 5 years resident permit.

Interestingly, statistics have shown that in 2012 alone, South Africa received a total of 73,282 Nigerian tourists which is 13.8 percent increase from 2011 contributing about 720 million Rands (N11.8 billion) to the South African economy within the period.”

FrontiersNews investigation showed that despite the agreement, implementation is yet to kick off as according to close sources “South Africa is still foot dragging about the whole thing.”

This was further confirmed by South African Journalist, Sabelo Ndlangisa, who said that SA is unlikely to lift travel restrictions for Nigerian ­citizens in the near future, even though the West African country wants visas to be waived for ­nationals of the continent’s two most powerful economies.

Quoting Mr. Obed Bapela, Deputy Minister in the presidency for monitoring and evaluation and the ANC’s International Relations head, Ndlangisa said the South African government was hesitant because information technology systems between the two countries were not compatible. Nigeria, which has a population of 167?million, does not yet have a population register.

“We know who is who in our population because we have a census that we keep updating. In Nigeria, with such a big population, if they all apply to come to South Africa without a visa, we’ll not be able to check who is here and who has gone back.

“Those are the issues and the ­instruments that we say we are willing to (waive), but (Nigeria) could put systems in its own governance that begin to give us comfort as South Africans that this movement, while it needs to be freer, is also a controlled one,” he said.

He said South Africa’s concerns over security were not dissimilar to those raised by the UK, which has required South African travellers to the UK to hold visas until South African identity documents are safer and not as easy to forge.

But in a separate chat , Assistant Comptroller General in charge of Visa/Entry permit in Immigration, Mr. Godwin Ogbejuwa, while acknowledging that the agreement was in progress said a lot still needed to be done to make the agreement fully operational.

Mr. Ogbejuwa said: “I think the agreement which bothers on admittance of some certain persons within the two countries, I mean holders of diplomatic and official passports; it is on, we have reached some high level in our discussion with our counterpart in South Africa.

“As of the last time we held meetings together with the officials of the foreign Affairs they presented their own specimen copy of their official passport and the diplomatic, we have also directed our service provider (Iris Smart Technologies ) to forward our specimen to us, (Visa and Entry Permit Department ) once we get the specimen, the actual implementation will take place , once all the conditions have been met. And that I can assure you will take place soonest,” he further explained.

But with Nigeria yet to put in place a central database that captures its 167million population, the visa agreement may just be another in the several agreements that have been entered into by the country over the years.

That is good news..

Deny them for all i care. I dnt wanna go to SA, i don't wanna die yet