A Travel Agent’s
“Surreptitious overture” In A UK Marriage Scam Lands Unassuming Emmanuel Makinde In Wrong Position
FANZINE VISA SCAM AND THE SORRY PREDICAMENTS OF EMMANUEL MAKINDE
Emmanuel Opeyemi Makinde, a student of University of Surrey in the United Kingdom must right now be rueing his unfortunate fate in the hands of a Nigerian travel agent who has virtually ruined his educational prospects and sown unimaginable problems in his economic and marital life.
On paper, Makinde is married to one Dolapo Affusat Yusuf, a woman that, in reality, he does not know, has also never met, and much less got married to. This unbelievable scenario was forged before he travelled to the UK without his knowledge by his travel agent back in Nigeria, Mr. Shitta Waliu Aderibigbe who runs a travel agency known as Fanzine Education Consult. Even long after he had arrived the UK and managed to commence his studies, Makinde had no idea that all the clandestine moves that went behind his back before he left Nigeria would eventually return to haunt him, until the British home office sent him a letter informing him he had been married to this Affusat before leaving Nigeria and querying why he lied in his visa application that he was never married.
The truth about Makinde’s marital status is that he actually got married to his wife before leaving Nigeria and the plan was for her to later join him at a later point. But this wife still stays in Nigeria and she is not and has nothing to do with the Affusat the travel agent stated in Makinde’s application. It was however at the point of applying for visa for her in order to bring her to join him in the UK that the British home office discovered the inconsistency in his original application which stated that he was already married to this strange woman, who, to further make matters worse, actually already lives in the UK passing as his wife.
A major cause of all these was because before Makinde left for the UK in 2023, wholeheartedly believing that his travel agent runs a registered business paid for and entrusted all the processes and procedures for his travel preparations to him. By doing so, Makinde inadvertently initiated a situation that actually prevented him from the chance of monitoring his agent’s activities. This eventually left him with virtually little or no means of knowing that, all the while, his agent ran a visa racket which involved smuggling people out of Nigeria by mixing up and filling in the visa details of other people. According to Makinde, his visa agent stole his identity and inserted a fake marriage document into his migration history without his knowledge; thereby causing him to commit a migration fraud which now not only threatens his education and has created an intractable identity crisis which has not only blocked his chances of finding any job to augment his finances, but also created the chance of his being deported to Nigeria.
Two curious and laughable scenarios that could have actually exposed the fraudulent disposition of Makinde’s travel agent or send an early warning to him about the duplicitous character of his travel agent actually played out after he had secured his university admission shortly before he left Nigeria. One was when he asked the agent to help him secure an accommodation in the UK and the agent gave the untenable excuse that he did not have data on his phone and did not have money to communicate with the UK. Even if Makinde could have suspected at that point that anything was amiss, it was too late in the day as he had already paid nearly six million Naira to Aderibigbe to secure his admission and his visa at that point. The other equally confounding scenario also quietly playing out in the background of all these was that Makinde had been sworn into secrecy by his pastor who advised him to be discreet about the whole process.
According to Makinde, this pastor had been of immense help to him all along in his past struggles with schooling and life and he was the one that actually introduced the travel Aderibigbe to him as a trusted travel agent. Typical of any disaster waiting to happen, most of the moves made to secure the admission and procure the visa involved a great deal of confidentiality bothering near secrecy. Makinde said his pastor had warned him not to divulge the details of the efforts being made for his travel to the public. “When I was leaving Nigeria, you know all these Nigerian pastors, he kept telling me not to tell anybody my plans, and that before telling anybody my plans, it should be after I had settled down in the UK because there is something about African people. So don’t tell anybody your plans, don’t let them spoil your plans” And that was the reason why I did not involve anybody and nobody else knows in order to tell me that Makinde, you need to request this and this kind of documents from this gent, he added.
Just few months into his resumption at school, Makinde’s class schedules suddenly began to be disrupted by having to regularly answer to the fallouts of questionings over the discrepancies found in the details his travel agent filled for his visa applications. He now faces the unfortunate prospect of deportation from the UK, a situation which, if allowed to develop, would inevitably result in the total ruin of further prospects of his education and the certain loss of the millions of Naira he had already spent on his tuitions and travel procedures.
The questioning from the British Home office have remained unrelenting; why has he continued to pass as a single, unmarried individual when his documents state that he was indeed married. Makinde actually got married to his wife before he left Nigeria, but the woman to whom he got married was not Affusat as stated filled in his visa applications by his travel agent.
For the better part of this year, Makinde has found himself fighting to salvage his education and restore his credibility both in the UK and in Nigeria. He is currently saddled with the unenviable stress of a prolonged and so far unsuccessful effort to convince British immigration officials that he never got married to Affusat before he left Nigeria. Tracking down, arresting and prosecuting Aderibigbe in Nigeria continues to drain his scarce resources and precious time.
Embroiled in these problems, Makinde currently carries on with this struggle to extricate him name from this prolonged identity crisis foisted upon him by his travel agent but have remained unsuccessful. What has now further complicated his challenges is that these situations have lingered until now when radical changes have just been introduced into British immigration rules. This month, what can be considered as perhaps the most extremely stringent immigration policies have kicked across the UK. Last month, an unprecedented wave of radical immigration policies, which affect nearly every category of foreigners wishing to work and study in that country has gone into force. Ostensibly triggered by an overwhelming influx of migrants originating mostly from Africa into the UK in recent years, these new laws which does not exempt foreign students studying in the UK is capable of creating extra huddles for Makinde considering his muddled up status.
How he would fare now under these stringent and limited choices can be better imagined than experienced.
Upon a petition brought before the Inspector General of Police in Nigeria on January 6, 2025, Makinde’s lawyers, Deji Adeyanju and Parters are already in court with Aderibigbe.
For his own part, Makinde is leaving no stone unturned in his bid to fully prove his innocence in the matter. Leadership, a leading Nigerian Newspaper reported earlier this year that the Nigerian police arraigned Aderibigbe and his firm before a High Court of Justice of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja “for allegedly giving false information to the British Government. The newspaper further reported that “Aderibigbe and his firm were arraigned on a two-count charge”, for which he actually pleaded not guilty! It stated further that “they were said to have engaged in the visa scam on January 19,2023. According to the charge dated April 9, 2014, Aderibigbe give false information to the British Embassy that Emmanuel Makinde Opeyemi is married to Dolapo Affusat Yusuf. The police further stated in the charge that the false information threatens to deport Emmanuel Makinde Opeyemi back to Nigeria.
While the threats hanging over Makinde continues to manifest, Makinde eventually managed to succeed in switching his visa to a tier two visa, but that visa itself eventually got cancelled creating for him a level of uncertainty and dilemma so acute that he currently needs all the help he can get to prove his innocence, salvage his reputation and regain the right legal status to enable him to continue to legally stay in the UK.
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