Nigerian Students In Russia Risk Deportation Over Passport Renewal

Oluwatobi OdeyinkaAugust 21, 20241 Mins read243

Some Nigerian students in Russia face the risk of being deported from Russia as the Nigeria Immigration Service office in Moscow reportedly fails to renew their passports.

Parents of the affected students who spoke to journalists in Minna, Niger State, disclosed that their wards could not renew their passports because the NIS claimed that it had no materials to print new passports.

The undergraduate students affected by the development reportedly called their parents about the impending deportation from Russia after efforts to renew their passports at the NIS office failed.

One of the parents who spoke with journalists in Minna, Yakubu Tauheed Bina, said it would cost him over N5 million for his son to return to Nigeria to renew his documents.

I wonder why the Nigerian Embassy in Russia has failed to find a lasting solution to the challenge. Is the federal government of Nigeria not funding the embassy in that country?

Earlier this year, Nigerian students at Teesside University in the United Kingdom almost got deported over their failure to pay school fees as a result of the poor value of the Naira. This was after President Bola Tinubu devalued the Naira.

Many Nigerians have lost their immigration status abroad due to failure to renew their passports or poor treatment in Nigerian embassies.

Nigeria’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, in a media interview where he attempted to explain the challenges faced by Nigerians abroad and the failure of the ministry, argued that the ministry is underfunded.

We are grossly underfunded, so you have a perpetual crisis due to the underfunding, and we need a mechanism… we have to give more to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs if we are going to maintain 104 missions around the world and also if we are going to reorganise the headquarters by giving it modern means of communication, he said.

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