Getting a United Kingdom visa can take weeks, months, years, decades or even a century if you don't intend dying too soon. Sometimes you are refused a visa not because you look like a vulture, but because the High Commission feels you have no business doing in Britain. In fact, you are only going to be a nuisance. There have also been unbelievable stories of passport pictures of young male applicants that suddenly become images of old ladies to the astonishment of embassy staff. The applicant is tempted to conclude that his grandmother had done it again - substituting his picture with her own image to befuddle those who grant visas. For the young applicant, there are two temptations; first is to find a sharp cutlass to butcher his grandmother like cow leg, or second, to forget about his grand-mum's electronic photo-imaging and to go the pastor. "The embassy says the picture on my passport is that of an 80-year-old woman. Pastor pray for me! Jesus Christ, I am not even 30 years on this earth." Of course, some pastors are specialists in visa affairs. Salvation is a secondary matter. Man must live by bread alone! If you don't survive on earth, how can you survive in heaven? If the pastor cannot help, the mallam can do it. Before a visa applicant finally lands in Britain, he has tested God and the devil in so many ways unimaginable and may have finally mortgaged his soul for a UK visa. The embassy staff will tell him, "You have now brought your own picture. Were you blind?" Landing in the United Kingdom is in fact no big deal although it can be a hustle. It is when you want to overstay your visa that you are likely to become a professional in how to dodge the police and immigration officials from dawn to dusk. Thou shall not be caught lest you wake up the next morning at Kotoka International. Welcome back to the kokonte city (apologies to Hon. Asamoah Boateng). Those who survive immigration policies of all forms and colours are geniuses to begin with. But the surest way to stay legally is to go the romantic path and marry a citizen. Some citizens are available for convenience marriages for a fee - no romantic liaison; just pay the fee and vamoose. Once in a while, a Ghanaian is trapped and becomes like a cornered rat. Other foreigners are in the same soup. They get attached to a British woman, they have a child and the woman seeks for divorce and uses the child to get a council flat. Many Africans and Jamaicans have fallen prey to such women. There is one celebrated case that might be a straight forward one without any ill-motive. But it has more questions than answers. One Benji Kumassah, a former 'Choice FM' presenter went to the UK, had a British girlfriend, Lizzy, and they got one child, a girl. Not long thereafter, Benji got sick of a brain tumour that weakened his immune enough to make him succumb to toxoplasmosis. According to medical facts toxoplasmosis is a common disease that is caused by infection with Toxoplasma gondii, one of the world's most common parasites found in undercooked or raw meat, cat faeces and any soil or cat litter contaminated with infected cat faeces. It cannot be passed on through person-to-person contact. Around a quarter to half of the world's population is thought to be infected and around 1% of people in the UK catch toxoplasmosis each year. In the majority of cases, those affected don't have any symptoms. This is because a healthy immune system is usually able to defend the body from the parasite. In Benji's case the brain tumour broke down his immune system and made him susceptible. The complex issue of Benji's case is that he finally died of toxoplasmosis and later, Lizzy who claimed she was not entirely sex-free when Benji was living somewhere else, got tested and proved positive for HIV. Strangely enough she claimed she was infected by her boyfriend, Benji, who didn't die of AIDS. Now Benji's baby is HIV-negative, but has no one to protect her reputation as a kid who is now unduly labelled as a child of an HIV father (which cannot be proved) and an HIV mother (which could be proved) although her HIV certificate is not available for verification. Now, the child is free from the virus, but not free from the HIV-father label. Benji is also dead and cannot talk for himself. His death certificate did not state that he had HIV, but toxoplasmosis. To be fair, this child deserves a better label, because she is being paraded differently, as having an HIV/AIDS dead father which is palpably false; what is the proof? Could it be that Benji had been a victim of the council flat trick? Why is Lizzy claiming that Benji had AIDS and infected her, when it is not certified that the man died of AIDS? Is it to give her the opportunity to use the child to solicit for funds in an HIV awareness programme as is being rumoured? The world would like to know. While not imputing any wrong-doing on the part of Lizzy, those travelling to the United Kingdom and other European countries and even the United Slates better start thinking about going legally to avoid all sorts of ploys engineered to take advantage of foreigners and make life miserable for them. The BBC has reported that a Nigerian woman has been jailed for 26 months for buying a baby from Nigeria, bringing the kid into UK to gain a council flat. Peace Sandberg initially told the council staff that she had given birth to the boy then changed her story to say he was adopted. If it would go as far as buying babies to make it a success abroad, then the world is truly getting near its end. Source: Merari Alomele Email: merarix2001@yahoo.co.uk