Getting past the immigration authorities:

One thing I forgot to mention in the drama from Burkina to Lagos is that, twice – once when getting the Nigerian visa - and once at the immigration desk at the Lagos airport, I was quizzed about the ‘friend’ I was coming to visit in Jos.

You see, if you tell the Nigerian visa people that you are on a contract with a development organization to review the financial procedures in their office (or almost any other kind of work, even if on a voluntary basis), they will inform you that there are Nigerians totally capable of doing this work, and refuse your visa.

In one sense, they’re right. There are 160 million Nigerians, many of them professionally trained and under-employed who could do something like what I’m doing. Unfortunately, because the nature of this work is so tied into the culture and specific working style of this particular development organization, not even a North American from outside of this organization could do the same work until properly oriented. But how do you explain that to the Nigerian government without coming off as superior?

So, if I wanted to get into Nigeria I needed to say I was visiting a friend – and since I’d already worked with the Nigerian accountant for this organization, he sent a letter ‘personally inviting me to visit him in Nigeria’, and my job was to ‘tell that story and stick with it’.

Twice I was challenged. The visa officer asked questions, and even phoned my friend – from Benin – to see if he would answer questions in the same way that I had. Fortunately the conversation with the visa officer hadn’t got so detailed that we got tripped up there. So, that test was passed.

Then at the Nigerian immigration desk, the woman looking at my passport started asking questions. You see, a lot of people enter Nigeria ‘to visit friends’ but are actually coming in to fulfill a contract for work or volunteering – so the authorities ask questions, but half-heartedly.

This woman went so far as to ask ‘is he really your friend?’, and since I’d already had my butt kicked by the visa officer in Benin, I was better prepared mentally. I took the tactic of answering a question with a question and asked ‘why do you ask?’. It was effective, in part because it would be impolite on her part to suggest I was lying, and since she wasn’t hardened enough in her work and had no real evidence to back up that suggestion, she let it go – and let me go.

If she’d searched my luggage, she would have seen the paperwork from Burkina, and pretty much had me nailed, but it isn’t her job to search the luggage – and the people whose job it is to search the luggage are instructed to look for dangerous things, not work documents.

As Leonard Cohen says, ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’