MY PASSPORT IS GREEN

Much of the last 14 years of my life have been lived in varying socio-cultural settings away from my ancestral backgrounds. I had my higher education surrounded by a different tribal group within the country of my birth. Presently I dwell as an immigrant worker in an African country while I possess a temporal resident permit in another. Hence I have come to appreciate heterogeneity in the human race. As a foreigner, I don’t crave for the benefit of certain privileges of my host community because I know I am not entitled to them. I have also had to endure insults in different forms (understood or not) and occasionally put up with some level of humiliation that being foreigner necessarily subjects people to. I have accepted my lot as a foreigner and I don’t grumble. I try to live my life in peace and seek the common good in every location I have found myself.

I am a Nigerian. Unfortunately there is just so much distrust when people relate to my country men. From the hassles of getting a visa/foreign airport reception to making a “legal living”, one is treated with the highest grade of suspicion and sometimes subjected to such ridicule that violates the universal principles of fairness. I really don’t blame people from all these other countries when Nigerians are treated to such shame in foreign lands since common knowledge attests to the many imperfect conduct of my fellow citizens; almost to my shame! And because we are considered guilty until proven otherwise, corrupt officers of foreign governments have taken advantage of our dreadful reputation. Here is my most recent experience:

I had to cross international borders a few days ago, specifically one that I have crossed already this year. I was travelling back to my job from sitting for a professional exam in another country. On collecting my green passport, the immigration officer took a look and asked me to wait. He then called me in, made a gesture to the pages of the passport and said that the official stamp on my temporal resident permit was “not straight” (the line of the date it bore didn’t form a perfect straight line on a horizontal plane) hence “it must be fake”. I was alarmed. He offered to help me if I’d give him some money. Well, too bad for him. The sophistication of this age means that I don’t carry cash around. I knew that if he were to literally turn me inside out, there was very little money on me. My passport had been checked more than once across the same border, so I was sure there was nothing counterfeit on my passport. When he could not extract anything from me, he said to wait further. I hung on there for about an hour, taking sips upon sips from my water bottle until he shamefully acted up. He made a copy of my (now famous) green passport saying he would fax it to the immigration headquarters for verification and possible correction, and then stamped me out. Not even a coin had as much as accidently fallen off from me to him. However, I came out only to find out that the vehicle I was travelling in had long gone, along with it my luggage. It was at this point I started getting irritated with the whole treatment I had been subjected to. As I was in familiar territory, I was able to find alternative means to get to my destination and gladly recovered my luggage.

What a world! We live to interact with other people, tribe and nations. Man has always been on the move. Whether it’s towards a better life or for the sake of adventure, people will always seek for something away from their home. But every stranger or visitor deserves to be given a fair chance. For anything, who knows who would be the host next time? I have once been badly treated by a government official who few weeks later became my patient.

As for my green passport, I am still not sure I’m happy travelling with it. People should be wise in relating with others from the generalised perspective of their people group. We are firstly individuals, then a part of our communities.