On 11 November 2019, three prime ministers took to the stage at a five-star hotel in London. The premiers – from St Lucia, Albania and Montenegro – were speaking at a conference put on by Henley & Partners, a firm that acts as matchmaker between the super-rich and countries selling citizenship.¹

Allen Chastanet, from the former British colony St Lucia, reassured the audience that they wouldn’t actually have to live on the Caribbean island, just invest $100,000 and buy a house there. The real prize on offer was a ‘golden passport’ that bestows visa-free travel to 145 countries, including the UK, members of the EU Schengen area, Hong Kong and Singapore.

If you go onto Henley & Partners’ website, a Quality of Nationality Index (QNI) is on hand to rank countries based on the privileges a passport can bring, alongside levels of development, economic strength and ‘peacefulness’.² While being born Swiss pretty much guarantees you a healthy life, good education, freedom to travel, work and reside in over 40 other rich nations, being born Somali is a ‘liability’, in the words of QNI’s creator, the citizenship scholar Dimitry Kochenov.³ You face a 20-percent chance of dying before you turn five and your passport offers no legal exit from the life chances prescribed to you, at random, at birth. And unlike Henley & Partners’ prospective clients, you can’t buy your way out.

The QNI index illustrates a system of global mobility apartheid in stark, racialized terms. The majority of access-all-areas ‘super-citizenships’ are associated with former empires. Wealth disparity correlates neatly with the rights and freedoms – or lack of them – brought by your nationality. Africa is almost exclusively in possession of ‘low’ people move, unauthorized, that it’s treated as a problem.