To a lot of people outside Africa, the word Nigeria is synonymous with scam and it’s the same reason honest Nigerians will never be able to buy or sell on eBay or legitimately own a PayPal account. While some Nigerians consider it unfair to judge a whole nation based on the crime of a few citizens, others have devised ways to open and verify PayPal accounts directly from Nigeria using proxies and VPN. Although some successfully do this, there are countless cases of limited accounts and trapped earnings and this has made it rather hard for Nigerian internet marketers and freelancers to operate their businesses, expand globally or work with clients outside the country.
With so many websites today accepting only PayPal as the form of payment, purchasing goods and services from Nigeria at times can be impossible and this can be frustrating.
It’s rather unfortunate that Nigeria, which happens to be Africa’s largest economy, has to cope without PayPal, eBay and other services enjoyed worldwide. This has led to a petition by a user on Change.org calling Paypal to bring its service to Nigeria. The petition claims there are successful brands and e-commerce companies in Nigeria would do anything to be official PayPal partners. The petition even suggests PayPal should enforce manual identity verification to control scammers:
We wouldn’t even mind having to verify identity manually via International passports or something. There are new-age banks like GTBank that I’m sure would kill to be an official PayPal partner. These are possible scenarios that are better than locking a country out totally.
Right now, honest Nigerians who need to purchase goods or services online through PayPal have to go through self proclaimed PayPal gurus and experts who run PayPal accounts. According to Olawale Daniel, one of those that signed the petition:
My business depends most[ly] on it and I don’t really know why PayPal would neglect [a] country like Nigeria with millions of dollars recorded from the country in sales of services/products worldwide. China and other Asian countries had nowhere else to sell to than Nigeria because of [the] high level of trust in doing business with real Nigerians with integrity. Even if it is worth doing physical verification and many others, they should consider valuable services being rendered to the other part of the world from Nigeria by businesses.
Perhaps Payal is scared of Nigeria, but this is not enough reason to lock out the whole country completely. Being the largest economy in the whole of Africa, Nigeria as well has the highest internet penetration in Sub-Saharan Africa and PayPal would definitely further aid the economic growth of the nation.The petition might not change anything but then it’s better to try and fail than to do nothing at all. I’m a Nigerian, an internet user and and I’ve signed this petition. Have you? You can join the cause here and let your voice be heard.