Technology has made the endless wait for passport processing untenable, argues JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
In 2024, I was part of a board planning a trip across South-East Asia. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan; three extraordinary countries, each worth the journey. When I sat down with the calendar and began mapping the visa applications, the problem became apparent. Each embassy required physical passport submission. You cannot submit your passport to two embassies simultaneously. You cannot apply for a Japanese visa while your passport is sitting at the South Korean consulate. For every application, the document you cannot travel without becomes a hostage of the application process itself.
Taiwan was the last stop on the itinerary and offered the most processing time. I applied for Taiwan and abandoned Japan and Korea. Not because I did not want to visit. Not because the application requirements were too demanding. Simply because the sequential nature of physical passport submissions made it logistically impossible to apply for all three within the available window. I was the only board member who had to make that choice. The others, travelling on passports that require no visa, faced no such constraint. Same board. Same trip. Entirely different experience of the bureaucratic reality of international travel.
The same problem resurfaced more recently when a visa I needed had expired and required renewal. I checked the stated maximum processing time. There appeared to be sufficient room before my next travel commitment. There was not. The passport was held for nearly eight weeks. Commitments were missed. It took measures I should not have had to deploy to get my own travel document returned. This is not a unique story. Ask around. The variations of it are endless; Nigerians, other Africans, people from across the Global South navigating a system that treats their freedom of movement as a problem to be managed rather than a right to be facilitated.
And the year is 2026. Artificial intelligence is writing code. Commercial rockets are landing themselves. And your passport is in a tray at an embassy, waiting.
This is not a complaint rooted in ignorance of why visa requirements exist. Countries have the sovereign right to control who enters their territory. That argument is not being contested here. The question being raised is entirely different and considerably simpler: why, in 2026, does exercising that right require confiscating someone’s primary travel document for weeks at a time?
Australia understood this problem three decades ago. For the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Australia did not require passport submissions for visa applications. The East African Community adopted electronic visas in 2014, requiring no passport submission whatsoever. The technology and the administrative will to separate the question of whether someone may enter from the requirement to physically hold their passport during the decision-making process have existed for thirty years. The countries that adopted those systems early did not sacrifice security. They updated their infrastructure.
Today, the United Kingdom no longer requires passport submission for most visa applications. You apply online. The document stays with you. If the visa is granted, the passport is submitted for a matter of days (sometimes hours) to have the visa sticker affixed. Some countries go further: the visa arrives by email, or via a secure download on a passworded platform. No physical submission at any stage. The security assessment happens through digital verification, biometric data, and background checks. The passport remains where it belongs. In the possession of its owner.
These are not futuristic proposals. They are existing practices in functioning democracies that have decided to treat the inconvenience of travellers as a problem worth solving.
The human cost of the current system is not abstract. When your passport is at an embassy, you are not just waiting for a visa. You are frozen. A business opportunity that requires travel to a third country cannot be taken. A family emergency in another country cannot be attended. A speaking invitation, a board meeting, a conference, graduation; all of it stops while your document sits in a queue. For people travelling on passports that already carry the burden of limited visa-free access, this immobility compounds what is already a structurally unequal global mobility system.
There is a case to be made—and it is occasionally made—that stringent processing requirements exist because of the behaviour of a minority of applicants from certain countries. Even if that argument is accepted entirely, it does not justify a system design that punishes the majority for the conduct of a few. Banks do not confiscate all customers’ funds because some customers have committed fraud. Airlines do not impound all passengers’ luggage because some passengers have attempted to smuggle contraband. The principle of proportionality; designing systems that address specific risks without penalising everyone is not a radical idea. It is standard institutional practice everywhere except, apparently, in visa processing.
The argument here is not that embassies should relax their scrutiny of applicants. Scrutinise thoroughly. Verify rigorously. Decline applications that do not meet requirements. All of that is entirely legitimate. The argument is that none of those objectives require physically holding someone’s passport for weeks while that assessment is being made. The assessment and the physical document are two separate things. Technology has made it possible to conduct one without holding the other. Countries that have recognised this have not become less secure. They have simply become less cruel in their administration of the process.
Reform in this area is not a gesture of generosity toward travellers from less powerful passport nations. It is an acknowledgement of basic administrative modernity. The embassies and consulates that still operate on the premise that a physical passport submission is the only way to process a visa application are not protecting their borders more effectively than those that have moved on. They are simply running older systems.
What I experienced in 2024, and again recently, is not unusual enough to be remarkable. That is exactly the problem. The day it becomes remarkable, the day people are genuinely surprised to hear that a passport was held for eight weeks, is the day we will know that something has actually changed.
We are not there yet. We are already late.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing
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