By Hiran Chohan, Windsor Capital Management
For years, the conventional wisdom around citizenship by investment has assumed a simple motive: people buy a second passport to leave! To escape instability, currency risk, or a government they no longer trust. In my years advising clients across Africa, Nigeria in particular, on Caribbean citizenship by investment programs, I’ve found that assumption is often wrong, or at least incomplete.
Most of my African clients have no intention of relocating. Many have thriving businesses, deep family roots, and genuine attachment to their home countries. What they are buying is not an exit. It is a change in how the world treats them.
Passport as Perception, Not Just as a Document
A passport does two things simultaneously: it grants rights of entry, and it shapes how its holder is perceived, independent of who they actually are. Nigeria currently sits 89th on the 2026 Henley Passport Index, with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to just 44 destinations, down from 50 the year before.
That number tells only part of the story. Global mobility infrastructure was not built around individual merit; it was built around nationality.
Two people with identical qualifications, financial standing, and travel history can face very different realities: Longer visa processing times, additional documentation requests, more involved bank account opening procedures, simply because of the passport they were born with, not anything about them as individuals.
One client, a successful entrepreneur with an outstanding record and extensive international business dealings, put it to me plainly; the friction he experienced when travelling had nothing to do with his personal history; it was simply a function of which passport he happened to hold.
Adding a Caribbean passport alongside his Nigerian one did not change who he was; it meant his nationality was no longer the first thing a border official or compliance officer reacted to. Being met as an individual, on his own record, rather than through blanket assumptions tied to nationality, is for many of my clients the single biggest value of a second passport.
Mobility as a Business Input, Not a Personal Indulgence
The second driver I hear consistently is more transactional but equally important: Mobility is a business input. For an entrepreneur whose deals depend on being able to fly to London, Dubai, or Vietnam on short notice, a visa application that takes weeks with no guarantee of approval is a direct constraint on growth.
It is the difference between closing a deal in person next week and missing the window entirely because a visa office needed a month to process a straightforward application.
Caribbean CBI passports offer visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 145 destinations, more than triple what a Nigerian passport alone provides. For clients running import and export businesses, negotiating with international partners, or simply managing assets across jurisdictions, that difference is not a lifestyle upgrade; it is working capital.
Every day spent waiting on a visa decision is a day competitors, nationals of countries with stronger passports, do not have to lose.
The Scale of the Demand Backs This Up
This is not a marginal trend. Henley & Partners reported more than 1,000 Nigerian inquiries about foreign citizenship in a single year, a figure their own team described as unprecedented. Nigerians accounted for roughly a third of all applications to Antigua and Barbuda’s CBI program in 2023.
Nigeria’s own legislature has taken the idea seriously enough to advance a domestic citizenship by investment bill through its House of Representatives, an implicit acknowledgment that the country’s largest economy recognizes the value proposition its own citizens are seeking abroad.
Why This Matters as the Landscape Shifts
This context matters more than ever as the EU tightens the screws on Caribbean CBI programs, most recently setting a formal 2028 deadline for the five Eastern Caribbean states to end their programs or risk losing Schengen access. Much of the commentary around that pressure focuses on Europe’s concerns about vetting and security. Less attention is paid to what clients are actually buying, and why.
If the industry and its regulators continue to frame citizenship by investment purely as a security or migration issue, they will keep missing the more human motivation behind it: the desire to be judged on who you are, not on an accident of birth.
For African clients in particular, a second passport is rarely about abandoning home. It is about ensuring that home is a choice, not a constraint, and that a border official, a bank compliance officer, or a business partner meets them on their own merits, not on assumptions attached to a nationality they had no say in choosing.
To learn more, contact Windsor Capital Management via our website.
