Until 1960 a Nigerian travelling abroad did so as a British Protected Person — a category created by the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act and consolidated under the 1948 British Nationality Act. The document was a buff-coloured booklet issued by the Governor's office in Lagos under the seal of the Foreign Office. It conferred British consular protection without conferring British citizenship. Azikiwe travelled to Lincoln University in 1925 on one. Awolowo travelled to London for his Bar examinations in 1944 on one. Tafawa Balewa travelled to the Institute of Education in 1945 on one. So did the eighteen-year-old Wole Soyinka in 1954.
On 1 October 1960 the British Protected Person status was extinguished at midnight. The First Republic issued its first green Nigerian passport the same week, under the Nigerian Citizenship Act of 1960 and the Immigration Act of 1963. The booklet was thirty-two pages, hand-written by Immigration clerks at the federal passport office in Lagos, and bore the federal coat of arms approved that September. Issuance was free for civil servants and £2 for everyone else — about three weeks' wages for a junior clerk. The first holders were the Cabinet, the federal civil service, and the new diplomatic corps.
The 1976 Murtala reforms introduced a machine-readable passport that complied with the new ICAO Document 9303 standard, centralised issuance under the Nigeria Immigration Service (separated that year from the Customs and Excise Service), and standardised the photograph and signature pages. It also opened the first overseas passport offices at Nigerian missions in London, New York and Geneva. By 1980 there were roughly 180,000 Nigerian passports in circulation.
The 1980s booklet shortage became the first political scandal of the Nigerian passport. By 1984 the Murtala-era stock was exhausted and the Buhari government had no foreign exchange to import replacement booklets from the De La Rue printing works in Basingstoke. Issuance slowed to a crawl. A black market in passport booklets opened at Alagbon Close, the Immigration headquarters in Lagos, with verified prices of ₦200 to ₦800 for a booklet whose official fee was ₦35 — a scandal documented by the 1986 Federal Audit. The fee was raised, the queue lengthened, and the term *Andrew* (after the iconic 1986 'Andrew checking out' television commercial) entered the language to describe the Nigerians the passport was now serving in numbers.
The e-passport was introduced by the Obasanjo administration on 27 May 2007, replacing the machine-readable booklet with a polycarbonate-page biometric chip passport produced by Iris Smart Technologies under a 2006 concession. Nigeria became the second African country (after Senegal) to roll one out. The technology was sound; the rollout was not. Booklet scarcity persisted through every subsequent administration, peaking in 2021–22 when the Minister of Interior Rauf Aregbesola publicly admitted to a backlog of more than 150,000 applications caused by an inability to import polycarbonate data pages. The Tinubu administration's 10-year passport, introduced in May 2023 alongside an upgraded 5-year version, increased the price of the standard 32-page 5-year booklet from ₦25,000 to ₦35,000, and the 64-page 10-year version to ₦100,000 — placing a basic travel document above the federal minimum wage for the first time in Nigerian history.
## What a Nigerian passport buys
The official function of a passport is to assert citizenship and request safe passage. The practical function, in the Nigerian case, is to negotiate the visa regime of every country the holder wishes to enter. On the 2024 Henley Passport Index the Nigerian passport ranks 94th of 199, with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 45 destinations — roughly the same access as Cameroon, Mali, and the Republic of Congo, and considerably less than Ghana (66), South Africa (104), or Botswana (89). The 45 destinations are predominantly ECOWAS members, a handful of Caribbean islands, and the East African states that have adopted regional visa-free arrangements.
For the destinations that require a visa — which include every European Union member state, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, the UAE, every G20 economy, and almost every country to which Nigerians wish to migrate for work, study or family — the Nigerian passport carries the additional burden of one of the highest visa-rejection rates in the world. The European Commission's Schengen Visa Statistics for 2023 record a Nigerian Schengen-visa rejection rate of 45.9 per cent, the highest of any African country with more than 10,000 applications and the third-highest globally. UK visa rejection rates for Nigerian applicants stood at 41 per cent in 2023 (Home Office immigration statistics). US B1/B2 visitor-visa rejection rates were 75 per cent in fiscal year 2023 (US State Department consular returns), among the highest worldwide. Canadian visitor-visa refusals for Nigerians stood at 68 per cent in 2023 (IRCC quarterly data).
The practical meaning is that the Nigerian passport, in 2024, is a document that costs the holder more than a month's minimum wage to obtain, takes between four weeks and eighteen months to issue, and is then rejected by between four and seven out of every ten consulates to which it is presented. It is, in functional terms, the most expensive permission slip in the country and the one least likely to deliver the permission for which it was issued. The Andrew of 1986 left on the machine-readable booklet. The Andrew of 2024 collects the e-passport, applies for the Canadian Express Entry skilled-worker stream or the UK Health and Care Worker visa, and joins the queue at the High Commission in Walter Carrington Crescent.