For frequent African travellers, the fuss around Yellow cards is not an unfamiliar concept. As a Nigerian travelling from Nigeria to the Republic of Benin, for instance, you'd require a valid passport and yellow card to be able to cross the Seme border.

But like with many things in Nigeria, the mere concept of ease of passage is a scam, because even if you have all your documents complete, crossing that border requires some unofficial payments here and there. From experience, the payments you most times cannot get out of are for when you have a "virgin passport" or "virgin yellow card".

For this reason alone, the recent move to introduce new yellow cards deserves to be looked into a little more closely. Let's look at some quick facts about the yellow cards:

In April 2013, the Ministry of Health announced to the public that they would be introducing new Yellow Cards "of international standard" as a way to curb fake cards flooding the country. Those yellow cards were supposed to be difficult to fake because of the new and improved "six unique security features" on them. People with the old cards were given an ultimatum of six months to get the new high-security cards for N1000.

Fast forward to August 2018, the government again announced new machine-readable yellow cards to enforce the inoculation process among the travellers.

Registration and payments of N2000 for the cards are to be done online and receipts taken to port health centers for vaccination and printing of the cards. On Thursday, January 3, FAAN announced that old cards will be obsolete by April 1 so everyone should have gotten the new e-yellow cards by then.

This means that a traveller that obtained a yellow card and yellow fever vaccination in 2010-2012 would have had to purchase new yellow cards thrice while his/her vaccine was still effective. While there cannot be an overdose of the Yellow Fever vaccine per se, it is simply ridiculous if travellers are expected to keep pumping their bodies with vaccines and paying unnecessarily.

One theory i have for the new release, is that the roll-out of the old cards were riddled with lots of illegal card issuance, hence causing imbalance in remittances. Premium Times reported in September, 2018, that a lot of "Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike, daily leave the country with the card but without vaccination against the disease." Another worry I have is that other countries might not be getting the memo that these new roll-outs are happening. Some travellers have reported to have had their yellow cards seized and declared to be fake, in countries like Ghana and Kenya.

I can't also help but point out that this announcement is coming quite too timely, especially with the recent Yellow Fever outbreak that shook Nigeria a bit in November, 2018.

While I realise that the introduction of the e-yellow cards is a good step in the direction of digitizing traveller information and ensuring people actually take the vaccine, it starts to resemble a legal scam, especially when the government keeps "re-designing cards" on a whim and expecting Nigerians to pay for new ones while their already purchased cards keep getting obsolete.