Britain: Britain, facing a logjam of faulty visa applications, yesterday shut the door, at least temporarily, on young Nigerians visiting the country for the first time.
Until an unspecified date in 2006, no first-time visa applications will be accepted from Nigerians aged between 18 and 30, the Foreign Office said in a statement.
The ban does not apply to students or selected business travellers, the statement added. "We are getting an 80 per cent refusal rate for a variety of reasons, from forged documents to incomplete ones to failure to turn up for interview," said a spokeswoman.
She noted that the two visa offices in Nigeria - Lagos and Abuja - were receiving 23,000 visa applications a month, and that many of these were from that age group. - (Reuters)
