Controversy Trails Reversal of UAE Visa Ban on Nigerian Travelers

Despite the excitement of this welcome development, Nigerians have taken to social media to voice their concerns over the terms of this new agreement and its incredibly exclusionary details.

“This agreement includes updated controls and conditions to facilitate obtaining a UAE visa,” Idris had written in his brief statement, before sharing the link to the Document Verification Hub (DV Hub) website, which contains details of what many Nigerians see as a tedious, exclusionary, and largely unfavorable process.

Nigerians seeking to apply for a visa to the UAE are now required to pay a non-refundable fee of ₦640,000 (about $400) and have a $10,000 (or its equivalent) balance in their accounts, to receive a Document Verification Number (DVN). The DVN fee is also completely separate from the visa application fee, which ranges from $10 to $231. Also, the DVN is only “valid for 14 days from issuance, or once your visa application has been processed by the visa application department (whichever of these comes first),” says the DV Hub website. This means applicants will likely obtain a new DVN during each application process.

These terms are steep for a country going through its worst economic crisis in decades, leading many to speculate that the fee had been instituted by the government themselves.

A new report by local publication, TheCable has confirmed those fears. The paper disclosed that the UAE administration confirmed that it has no involvement or affiliations with the website the Nigerian government shared. TheCable stated that the UAE’s General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners’ Affairs (GDRFAD) also said they are unaware of the $10,000 bank balance requirement as stipulated by the website.

OkayAfrica reached out to the office of Nigeria’s Ministry of Information but did not receive clarification on the matter by the time of publication.

A disruptive ban

Nicole Nneka Nwachie, a food and beverage entrepreneur, who was expanding her Lagos food brand in Dubai at the time, says the visa ban meant that there were fewer Nigerian tourists — her main target audience — coming in to patronize her business in Dubai.

“After conducting a market survey during my vacation in 2019, Dubai UAE seemed like the best place to expand my business. LikeMamaDoes is a food service that specializes in authentic Nigerian dishes,” Nwachie says. “UAE is one of Nigeria’s favorite vacation spots. In October 2022, I finally opened up my restaurant in the heart of Dubai (Business Bay, Dubai) because demand was high and I believed it was time to grow. [After] savings and investments worth over 100,000AED (over $27,000), we didn’t get to reap the fruit of our labor.”

Nwachie ended up shutting down her business after eight months, with her target market reduced by almost 75 percent. “As a business person, I began to doubt myself and my decisions for something I had no control over.

After my business shut down, I realized how seriously affected I was by this event. With staff members who depended on my business, and Nigerian suppliers both home and here in the UAE who were benefiting from our trade deals, everything came to a halt,” Nwachie tells OkayAfrica.

On one hand, Nwachie is excited that the ban has been lifted. This spells good news for her business and her ambitions in the UAE. In addition to that, Nwachie is thrilled to be able to see family and friends again. “My friends can visit again, employers will feel more comfortable hiring Nigerians now or even doing business with us, and my mom hopefully can visit me as I’ve missed seeing her for over three years.”

Still she, like many other Nigerians, is worried about the new requirements and what it would mean for middle-income Nigerians seeking to obtain a visa to the UAE. “These requirements have reduced the celebratory mood and I do hear some people [saying] that it is not a sensible step for them to take in the future as there are other countries to visit with less restrictive rules and they are right,” Nwachie says.

Whether the requirements will be reviewed soon remains to be seen, but the suspension of the ban now feels to many like continued travel restrictions many Nigerians already face, one exacerbated by exorbitant visa application fees, enormous ticket prices and hostile treatment of Nigerians while in transit.