Friday April 10, 2026

The US is pulling out. The UK and Canada made leaving more expensive. Both things happened this week.

The week that America formally declared 23 Nigerian states too dangerous for its own non-essential staff is also the week that the UK raised its visa fees. Canada announced it's doing the same.

That's not a coincidence that requires any explanation. It's just what happened, and the timing lands on the person planning to leave Nigeria in a specific way.

UK visa fee increases took effect on April 8, the same day as the US advisory. The short-term visit visa moved from £127 to £135. The skilled worker visa for more than three years, the one most Nigerians applying to work in the UK actually need, moved from £1,160 to £1,235. Naturalisation as a British citizen rose from £1,605 to £1,709. The UK also charges a health surcharge of £1,035 per year on top of most visa categories. At the April exchange rate of N1,822 per pound, naturalisation now costs roughly N3.1 million in fees alone, before you've factored in the English test, the life in the UK test, the biometrics, the legal help most applicants quietly need.

Canada's increases follow on April 30. The Right of Permanent Residence fee moves from CA$575 to CA$600. The citizenship processing fee moved in March from CA$119.75 to CA$123. IRCC said the adjustments reflect rising operational costs and are routine. They are routine. They also land in the same week that the most prominent reason to want to leave Nigeria got an updated official count.

The contradiction worth sitting with is this. The US is authorising its own people to leave Nigeria. The UK and Canada are simultaneously raising the price for Nigerians to arrive. Both governments are acting within their legitimate policy frameworks. Both decisions arrived in the same week. Neither was designed with the other in mind.

But you're not in either government's policy framework. You're calculating a number on your phone, probably late at night, running the total against what's in your account, wondering whether the window before the Canada deadline is still open, wondering whether the UK fee increase means you wait another cycle, wondering whether the thing that just happened in Kebbi is the thing that finally makes you stop wondering and start applying.

Both things are true at once. Leaving has never been more urgent for some Nigerians and more expensive than it was last week.