Nigerians who seek a visa to travel to major countries in Europe, the United States and Asia, spend over N75 billion annually on non-refundable payments for visa.
THISDAY’s investigation reveals that over 60 per cent of visa requests are rejected, with many applicants having to reapply multiple times, incurring additional costs.
While some of them are given, many are not, no matter how many times they tried; so, they lose the money paid for these visa requests.
For instance, the US embassy interviews applicants in different groups a day; if the number of applicants is conservatively put at 300 applicants per day, (the number is higher than this) at the cost of N299, 700 per applicant (the current cost of visa application), it will come to N89, 910, 000.
If this is multiplied with the five days of a working week, it will amount to N449, 550, 000; multiplied by four weeks, which is one month, it will rise to N1,798, 200, 000 and N21, 578, 400, 000 when multiplied by 12 months.
For the UK visa request, 200 applicants were chosen for a six-month visa, which cost N279,000, amounting to N55,800,000 a week, N1.1 billion a month and N13.3 billion a year. This is excluding the £1,070 for 24 hours and £500 for five working days that applicants pay for a priority visa.
Schengen, which is about 27 countries, charges N161,015 per applicant, which is N241,522,500 a week and N966,090,000 a month and N11,593,080,000 per annum.
Conservative calculation of the non-refundable payments by Nigerian applicants for these three major visas is N46, 471, 480, 000 and together with the projection of the cost of visa to Canada, China, Indonesia, India, Malaysia and others amount to about N75 billion repatriated from Nigeria annually.
The UK visa cost did not include the applicants who request for two years, which costs about N969, 699; applicants who request for 5 years visa, which cost about N1 732, 188 and applicants who request for 10 years visa, which cost about N2, 161, 918, as at July 14, 2025.
Conservatively over 3000 Nigerians make this request every year and the fees are also non-refundable.
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