Member-only story
What’s The Colour of Your Passport?
Nationality, social mobility and life outcomes.
Quick confession: I have an extraordinarily nasty habit and it entails checking the global passport index.
For those who aren’t in the know, the global passport index is the platform on which you are given an idea of the power of the document which allows you to travel freely or not in today’s interconnected and integrated world.
As a man of colour who was born in London in the late 1970s, when the British Nationality Act of 1971 was still in force, my citizenship was automatic, sparing me of the indignities that folks born after the 31st of December 1982 were subjected to, when Margaret Thatcher decided to pander to the prejudices of the natives.
The automaticity of my British citizenship is bookended by my Nigerian citizenship and this dichotomy is worth exploring for a minute.
While I may have been deliberately targeted at airports by overzealous officials at different points, my British passport has given me access to parts of the globe, of which holders of the Nigerian passport can only dream.
Aside from the West African region, where Nigerian citizens can travel freely, the business of venturing to other parts of the continent is just as stressful and demeaning as it is to seek a visa to Europe and the United States of America.
For thousands (or potentially millions) of Nigerians, their passport is confirmation of their lack of global status; the routine humiliation at the hand of white and non-white immigration officials and the thought that every holder of the green book is some sort of a fraudster or drug dealer.
This reality is even worse for folks from Somalia and Afghanistan.
It counts for little that Nigeria has a much bigger economy than several European and Latin American nations; its myriad problems ensure that it sits at the very bottom of global respectability.
The reality couldn’t be more different as British passport holder.
Despite our exit from the European Union, which has meant a change in the colour of our travel document, the business of moving from one country to another is largely visa-free.
