Pains, frustration of obtaining Nigerian passport abroad

Nigeria’s Foreign Missions ought to be a bastion and second home to citizens in the Diaspora, but the reverse is the case. From the United States to Germany, Canada, United Kingdom and Malaysia, it is tales of woes, disappointment, corruption, ill-treatment and poor services rendered to Nigerians by foreign missions. In this report, WALE ELEGBEDE looks at the anguish and frustrations which the country’s Diaspora citizens, whose yearly remittances average $24 billion experience to renew necessary documents in foreign lands

Alongside her five kids, she left her residence city, Munich, and headed to Berlin, the city that houses the Nigerian Embassy in Germany, with the intent of renewing her passports and validating other papers that will legalise her stay in the Western European country.

Ostensibly confident that her earlier scheduled online appointment with the Nigerian Embassy was sufficient for her to procure her passports and head back to her base, she undertook a four-hour journey with her kids via by rail for a fee of about 29 euros per seat.

On arrival in Berlin in the afternoon, she took her kids and headed straight to her country’s embassy located at Neue Jakobstrasse 4, 10179, presented her appointment letter but was allegedly told that she would not be attended to. Looking distraught in a viral video done to announce her predicament, the mother of five, who had to sleep outside the embassy premises alongside her kids, said she was helpless and feeble, as she had to spread cloths on the ground in front of the embassy’s building as she awaits Nigeria’s mission for her passports’ renewal.

“I don’t know what to do next,” was all she could mutter as she helplessly watches one of her kids cry profusely. A few months ago, a viral video made the rounds on social media where some Nigerians were seen in front of their country’s embassy in Bern, furious and claiming that the embassy called Switzerland police on its citizens seeking to renew their passports.

https://www.newtelegraphng.com/foreign-missions-underfunding-corruption-battered-nigerias-image/