It's Not As Great As You Think!

The line was terrible. I could hardly hear what he was saying but I could sense excitement in our network-induced breaking chat. So I called back and he delivered the good news, this time, hitch-free. His employer had agreed to sponsor his postgraduate education at Birmingham City University (BCU) in the UK – what he’d being praying about for quite some time. I was so happy for my childhood bosom friend. This was his third time of being admitted to the same institution to pursue a master’s programme in finance albeit his inability in securing funding in his first two attempts.  So for his employer to come to his aid meant the world to him – even more important than his salvation at that point in time [exaggeration mine]. This was in mid-July and the academic year was to start in September.

His employer wired the initial deposit required to secure his admission in the first week of August, and the school was supposed to send a ‘Confirmation of Acceptance to Studies (CAS) – a document one needs from a school to start the visa application process. The international admissions office confirmed receipt of the deposit and promised to issue the CAS within a fortnight as stated in the admission brochure. Now considering the fact that regular visa application takes 15 working days to be processed, we were hopeful the document would be received before the promised date, so my friend could leave the shores of Ghana by the 12^th of September.

Two weeks elapsed and he still hadn’t received the document from the school. I found that queer. I thought such occurrences only happened in Africa where deadlines run on wheels, as Nana Awere Damoah usually describes timelines for governmental projects. Nonetheless, we gave them the benefit of the doubt. After a couple of days, he informed me that the school has refused to issue the document because his employer isn’t an “international company”. In their correspondence with him, a link to the UK Visa and Immigration (UKVI) guidelines was given, particularly to the section describing who qualifies as a financial sponsor. Interestingly, it didn’t describe what an international company is. So I persuaded him to contact the UKVI officials for ‘further and better particulars’ as the supposed document authored by them is silent on the issue. Surprisingly, they were not forthcoming with the required information, and it seemed like the responses were automatic, directing us to the same section which didn’t address our concerns in the UKVI guidelines. After some persuasion, I agreed to use my international visa debit card in accessing their paid call service. Needless to say, it was an exercise in futility. I even accompanied him to the British Council one afternoon during my lunch break and was informed that they didn’t deal with ‘such issues’. Same response was given by a Ghanaian official at the British High Commission when we called, and to say I was at sea will be for lack of an appropriate description. The former, we could understand, but the British High Commission, as can be gathered from its website, operates by the UK Visa and Immigration guidelines, for chrissake! What other ‘issues’ do they deal with then? An attempt to draw their attention to this was met with some infuriation and a subsequent hung-up. Oh yes, she did!      

As can be imagined, the guy was overly frustrated, and rightly so because the biggest hurdle (i.e. funding) had been jumped without being tripped over. Certainly, this wasn’t supposed to be an issue, especially when his employer operated in 3 other African countries and qualified as an international company, was it?  I called the school to seek some explanation in my pseudo capacity as the Human Resource Manager in my friend’s company. Very lame reasons were proffered to justify the condition for a company to be international in order to act as one’s financial sponsor. If a company can show sufficient financial muscle to fund the education of its employee overseas, shouldn’t that suffice? What is it about international companies anyway, that it must be their sole preserve to sponsor an individual, among other institutions? Have many of them not gone bankrupt the world over?

A glimmer of hope, or so we thought, seemed to have been showed my friend when he received an e-mail from a Nigerian official in the international admissions office of BCU notifying him of the sighting of his CAS waiting to be processed in their database, and required some already supplied information. When he was contacted via skype and everything explained to him, he remarked he was only ‘interning’ at the admissions office, and couldn’t do anything about the situation although he agreed with our position of being international. He connected my friend to a colleague who works full-time in the office, and he gave a rather bizarre twist to the definition of an international company. “For example if a company based in the UK also has operations in France, it is international”, he said. When he was told that the employer is based in Ghana, but has operations in Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone, he modified his earlier example by adding USA (i.e. in a different continent), and asked whether my friend’s employer also operated in Europe, and that would have qualified as an international company. I was gobsmacked when my friend narrated the incident to me. My goodness! Do we still have such ignoramuses who think Africa as one large country sauntering the surface of the earth? So do I infer that companies like The Multimedia Group, Goil, Databank and other thriving ‘local’ companies can’t sponsor their employees further their education abroad? I don’t think I’ll be wrong if I did, because effectively, that is what they are trying to communicate. And that would be an aberration.

Sadly, 4^th September (CASs were not going to be issued after this date) passed without my friend smiling as he almost always did. Indeed, in his bid to convince them one more time, his e-mail was responded to with sheer arrogance. To say he was frustrated at the sudden turn of events will be a gross misrepresentation of his feelings. It was just sad.   

My avid readers will realize that I have strayed from my usual kind of articles. I figured I needed to narrate this unfortunate incident to the world and to tell officials at the embassies and high commissions (hopefully, they’ll get to read) to sit up and not think us fools. But for me, just as South African comedian Trevor Noah joked about the UK when he took his turn at the John Bishop Show and commenting on the country's immigration process, “it’s not as great as you think”!