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You arrive at a government office because you need a service. You have your documents. You have paid the required fees. You have probably taken three days off work and spent half your morning fighting traffic.
Passports are supposed to be the great equalizers of national identity. If two people carry the green-backed book stamped with the Nigerian coat of arms, the constitution insists they share the exact same claim to fundamental dignity and justice. But citizenship, like roaming data on a prepaid SIM, appears to depend entirely on which borders your passport happens to cross.
Yet the political theatre continues as if the data never arrived. Immigration remains the ultimate litmus test, the issue on which every faction must prove its manhood by sounding harsher than the last.
Political co-optation is not a Nigerian invention. It is one of the oldest and most elegant tools in the authoritarian toolkit far more refined than the crude business of jailing poets or shooting journalists. Why break a man’s spirit when you can simply rent it? Offer him a title, a salary, a motorcade, and watch the moral thunder turn into polite applause. History is littered with the wreckage of principles that met a well-timed appointment.
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