The concept of an Africa without borders for Africans remains poorly defined. National interests and capital flows, as well as fear, privilege and the parochial identity politics from the colonial era, drive decision-making when it comes to issuing permissions and passes for the movement of people. Paula Akugizibwe negotiates the terrain and wonders if there is enough will to get beyond the divisions and dependencies.
The Kampala sun burns through my clothes as I walk past the wilting queues in the Immigration compound. I am heading to an office on the other side to submit my passport application, together with a friend who knows all the right people here and has offered to guide me through the bureaucratic maze. As we pass by stagnant clusters of people waiting in the heat, I feel a blend of relief and unease at our privileged access. I have already gathered all the documents I need, so we expect that this will be quick.
This will not be my first Ugandan passport. Until the age of sixteen, I was officially a citizen of my mother’s country, although I had never lived here. I got a Rwandan passport when visiting my father’s country for the first time just before I started university in South Africa, where I had also completed my secondary schooling as a Ugandan citizen, and casually assumed my new Rwandan nationality without much thought. The significance of the change became clear in practical terms when I returned to South Africa and found that neighbouring countries – largely former British colonies or protectorates – were suddenly much less accessible. My previous passport from Uganda, also a former British colony, had previously allowed me to travel freely in the region. Rwanda, for all its efforts to shake its Francophone ties, was just not Commonwealth enough to allow the same privilege.
For every visit to my mother who was living next door in Botswana – where I had once been resident – we were now expected to follow an arduous visa application process. Unwilling to accept what she saw as nonsensical bureaucracy, my mother wrote an impassioned letter to the head of immigration, who responded with a face-to-face meeting, then a memo declaring her children free from this visa requirement. For everyone else’s children, the system remained unchanged, and every time I visited Botswana, I kept a copy of this letter folded in my passport to show any official who challenged my privileged access.
My Rwandan passport was not without its benefits. As a student, for example, it allowed me to benefit from a bilateral education deal that treated Rwandans as Southern African Development Community (SADC) students in South African universities, exempting us from the non-SADC fee surcharge of several thousand rand. That was many years ago. Now, with seemingly endless diplomatic strain between the two countries, it is impossible to apply for a South African visa with an ordinary Rwandan passport, although those with diplomatic or official passports continue to access South Africa freely.
A couple of years back my employers, who wanted me to be involved in some work in South Africa, asked if I didn’t have a Nigerian passport, remembering that I was born there but not remembering – or perhaps, not understanding – the bitter yellow fever showdown between the two countries and everything it represents.
“No, and a Nigerian passport wouldn’t make it easier anyway,” I responded, with no energy to elaborate. At the same time, I remembered that I am also a Ugandan citizen.
And so, after months of procrastination, I am finally here at the immigration office in Kampala. I’ve gone through the checklist several times to make sure it’s all ticked off. I have my correctly-sized photos, carefully-counted fees, form to present my application, cover letter to explain my application, statement from police confirming that I have lost my previous Ugandan passport… the list goes on. Everything, it turns out, except the instinct to avoid giving answers to questions that have not been asked.
The friend of my friend has gone through my documents and is about to hand it over for processing, when I casually mention my appreciation of Uganda’s decision to allow dual citizenship in 2009.
Before I can process my friend’s warning look, the official reacts: “You mean this is for dual citizenship?”
I’m confused by the change in tone. “Yes, I’ll keep my Rwandan and Ugandan passports. I think it’s now allowed?”
“It’s allowed,” he responds, with a definite “but” to follow, “Do you have a certificate?”
“My birth certificate?”
“Dual citizenship certificate.”
He can tell from my face that I don’t know what he’s talking about.
“First you apply for the certificate for dual citizenship. Then when it comes, you can apply for the passport.”
He rummages on the shelf and hands me a page with a list of requirements, which fill one side and continue on the reverse. I scan through, pausing to marvel at a few – a letter from a Ugandan sponsor who must be an administrative officer, advocate, bank officer, chairperson of a district, township authority, justice of the peace, magistrate, mayor, member of parliament, member of municipal council, minister of religion, notary public, physician or surgeon. A letter from Interpol, which will require its own biometrics and application process. A medical report on the sanity of the applicant, which could be fun. And, of course, more fees.
To the immigration officer I say thank you and that I’ll see him soon. To myself I borrow from my father’s frequent advice on my lifestyle choices: “You had better abandon that entire business”.
A few months later, when the African Union (AU) passport is launched with fanfare in Kigali, I am initially charmed by the seductive rhetoric of a borderless continent. The passport is a key aspiration of the AU’s 50-year plan for the continent, which among other things commits to “introduce an African Passport… capitalising on the global migration towards e-passports, and with the abolishment of visa requirements for all African citizens in all African countries by 2018.” The launch in Kigali introduces some fine print to this aspiration: this passport will be accessible, at first, only to heads of state, and officials with diplomatic or service passports. Much like we have learnt from the biblical parable of the talents, and every axis of privilege ever since – “to him who has much, more will be given” – so the African passport extends privileged access to those who already have privileged access.
Access has been promised to all citizens, eventually, with the initial target of 2018 later revised to 2020. Little else is known about how the passport would actually work, and how free the freedom of movement would be in space and time. Although there has been no explicit commitment by states to the principle of abolishing visa requirements for all Africans visiting African countries, this commitment is implied by the exemption of holders of the African passport from such requirements. The underlying immigration policies in African countries that remain hostile to other African immigrants, however, have not been directly addressed.
In February 2017, the AU states that the passport has been distributed to heads of state, ministers of foreign affairs, ambassadors, and some AU staff, and the onus is now on states to roll it out to civilians. But the AU secretariat seems unable or unwilling to explain the common standards, if any, that have been established across member states regarding the movement of ordinary people with the African passport, once states roll it out. My requests for clarity are met with silence. After months of observation, the vision of the African passport remains disappointingly vague. The hype, it seems, is all in the packaging.
In that sense, it might be a natural continuation of the AU’s approach to pan-Africanism over the past few decades, beginning with the foundational decision by its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity, to preserve colonial borders. With those splinters in place, institutional energy was oriented away from the painful roots of deep-seated divisions, towards the more lucrative approach of papering over cracks – all the while riding the swelling crest of nationalism. The concept of an Africa without borders has never been well-defined, points out Nedson Pophiwa, chief researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council, because “national interests remain a key priority for most member states… Borderlessness is a political and economic ideal that many leaders preach at regional community forums but rarely practise at local level.”
The practical reasons for a nationalist outlook are frequently repeated – fear of security threats posed by uncensored movements, fear of competition, fear of population strain on state resources. These fears persist in the face of contradicting evidence from countries that have pursued integration more aggressively, as seen with the Kenya-Rwanda-Uganda agreement under which citizens do not require passports for cross-border movement, and work permit requirements have been extensively relaxed. But fear, rather than rationality, has long been the main decision-maker where passports and visas are concerned. It was the violent conflicts of the First World War, and the masses of people moving between countries to escape these conflicts, that led to the entrenchment of passports and limited-stay visas in the Western framework for international travel. Over the decades, as liberation movements agitated in Africa, big sticks lost some sway in the colonies and passports also came to be a carrot. In the UK House of Commons in 1958, the under-secretary of state was warned that taking passports away from Africans – as had happened to two Ugandans who were supposed to travel to Brussels for an exhibition – represented “a perfect gift to the Communists, in that they can use it in their propaganda.”
When independence came, states embraced passports and other national identification systems along with the rest of their colonial inheritance, tweaking these to suit their sentiments. In 1965, speaking in the Kenyan parliament, Joseph Odero-Jowi, then assistant minister for social services and labour, proudly announced that, “If you look at the card we issue this day, you will find that instead of the ‘Colony and Protectorate of Kenya’ we have stamped it with a new star showing that it is the ‘Government of Kenya’, and with changeover we now use the ‘Republic of Kenya’.”
But others felt that more was needed, with one MP demanding new registration of all Kenyans by their right tribe, to correct the misclassifications that had happened under colonialism. “This will assist us to know the tribal strength, so that my people – the Abaluhya – could be known as number two in Kenya!” The assistant minister of land and settlement, in his response, seemed undecided on this point – arguing for the inseparability of tribe from personal identity, while acknowledging that it was important to discourage “the tribal barriers that were being enforced by the colonialists so that they could divide and rule us”.
These barriers have since been dropped from national identity documents, but dropping them from mindsets has proven, as always, to be a far more difficult task. Today, however, technology is a bigger focus where identity documents are concerned. The Kenyan government, like several others in the region, works closely with De La Rue, a British company whose Kenyan subsidiary the government now has a 40 per cent stake in, and which was contracted to roll out e-passports in the country. De La Rue is also the UK government’s official e-passport contractor, and has a longstanding presence on the continent: by 2012 it was already providing identity systems to 12 African countries. The transition to e-passports presents a new wave of business opportunities.
One of the challenges often flagged with the AU passport is that, being electronic, it would require states to have biometric systems in place for registration of all passport holders. At present, only 13 African countries use biometric passports. This presents a major feasibility problem, which is not necessarily a bad thing for everyone, because one man’s problem is another man’s market opportunity.
It is not yet known where and by whom the African passport would be printed, but if history is anything to go by, the manufacture of this 21st century symbol of pan-Africanism may well be outsourced to foreign companies and/or their subsidiaries.
According to a report by global market intelligence firm Smithers Pira, “The Future of Global Security Printing Markets to 2020”, the global market for security printing (which includes money, passports, and other identity documents) will grow to US$36.6 billion by 2020. Much of this growth, it states, will come from Africa, which is the fastest expanding regional market for security printing – driven by “prestigious population growth and increased mobility across the region driving spending from authorities on several new ID programmes”.
Nigeria’s recent shortage of passports and visa stickers was reportedly due to a lack of funds for the ministry to pay IRIS Smart Technologies Limited (ISTL), the Nigerian subsidiary of Malaysian company IRIS Corporation Berhad, which produces e-passports for the country. Although critics lamented the bureaucratic dysfunction and international embarrassment, one report suggested that there was more behind the government’s delay in accommodating the upward review of passport price requested by ISTL. According to a report published by Chikezie Omeje of the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) in Nigeria, the government is “not only worried about capital flight because of the huge amounts that [passports] cost us in foreign exchange, they also worry that a security document, such as the Nigerian passport, is produced by foreign companies in foreign lands.”
Such worries, long a part of the African landscape, appear increasingly absurd in the light of intensifying calls from African leaders for integration and autonomy. The true test of their integrity lies in whether or not states – which is to say, all of us – can build a way out of the divisions and dependencies that were programmed into these structures from the start, and undo the layers of privilege that disconnect high-level symbols of progress from the daily lives of ordinary people.
It often feels like the only solution is a technology more advanced than biometrics, one that would allow us to travel back in time and treat MP Zephaniah Anyieni’s remark to the Kenyan parliament in 1965 with the gravity it warrants: “While I fully support the change of the name of the identity cards, I also would like to ask any Member who still has a colonially-dominated mind to change that as well with the change of the card, so that, Mr Speaker, we do not only change the name of the identity card while many of our people still have the colonial mentality.”
This story, and others, features in Chronic: We Make Our Own Food! (April 2017). In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.
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For more by Paula Akugizibwe visit Chimurenganyana: You Look Illegal a mediation on skin, violence, and the limits of citizenship.
For more on the weaponization of migratory frameworks visit Chronic: Brandfort, Liberation Capital [1977-86] an exploration of the intellectual, social and political work of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela during the period of her banishment.