Before You Send Money for That Canada Admission, Read What Happened to Somto

The morning Somto found out her admission letter from a university in Manitoba was fake, she was standing in front of a beans seller on Ogui Road in Enugu, haggling over a derica cup like nothing in her life was about to fall apart.

Her phone had buzzed three times before she even looked at it. It was her cousin, Ada, sending a screenshot with just one line above it: Somto see this o, is this not your school.

The screenshot was a tweet. Someone in Toronto was warning Nigerians about an agent called Uncle Presh Travels and Consults, the same office that had taken four hundred and eighty thousand naira from Somto‘s father three months earlier, the same office with the framed Canadian flag by the door and the poster of a smiling white couple that had nothing to do with anything.

Ah ah, is this not fraud, the beans seller said, peering over Somto‘s shoulder without shame, the way only a Nigerian market woman can peer into another person’s business and call it concern.

Somto did not answer her. She was already walking, black nylon bag of beans swinging against her leg, thumb moving fast on the keyboard, typing into the family WhatsApp group that her father, Papa Chidi, had named OUR HOME (No Politics No Wahala) two Christmases ago, a name that had aged like fresh fish left outside a freezer.

By the time she got home to their compound off Zik Avenue, the group had forty six unread messages. Her father’s older brother, Uncle Nonso, had already sent a voice note that lasted two minutes forty seconds, most of it him breathing heavily and saying ehen every few seconds like a man rehearsing outrage before performing it live.

Papa Chidi was sitting on the veranda when Somto arrived, a plate of garri untouched beside him, his phone face down on the plastic table like he was afraid of what it might say next if he looked at it directly.

Somto, sit down first, he said, before she had even opened her mouth. Let us not shout ourselves into madness before we understand.

But there was nothing to understand that a normal person needed explained twice. Uncle Presh Travels and Consults had collected four hundred and eighty thousand naira for a Manitoba study permit application, complete with a letterheaded admission offer that Papa Chidi had framed, actually framed, and hung in the parlour beside his WAEC certificate and a photo of Somto in her NYSC khaki.

The Canadian institution’s own registrar’s office, reached through an email address Somto found buried in the small print of the letter, replied within a day. No such admission had ever been issued. No such applicant existed in their system. The letterhead was real, lifted straight off the school’s public website, but the letter itself was, as the registrar put it in careful academic English, not a document our office has generated.

So all this “your daughter don enter Canada” celebration we do for compound, na film we dey act, Uncle Nonso said that evening, sitting on the same veranda now, his voice doing the thing where anger and enjoyment mixed together, because a scandal in the family is still a scandal you get to talk about for months.

Somto wanted to scream. Instead she called the number saved as Uncle Presh Direct Line forty three times. It rang and rang, until on the forty fourth try, a woman picked up, not a man, a woman with a voice too calm for the situation.

Uncle Presh is currently attending to overseas relocations, he will call back, the woman said, as though he had been raptured to Winnipeg himself and was simply too busy settling in to speak.

He never called back. What called back, three days later, was a different kind of trouble. A boy from The Neighbourhood, Kelechi, who used to help fix generators around Ogui, sent Somto a voice note saying he had seen Uncle Presh at Godswill Akpabio Airport in Uyo, not travelling, but dropping someone off, driving what Kelechi swore was a brand new Lexus with Akwa Ibom plates.

Na my papa money buy that Lexus, Papa Chidi said flatly when Somto played him the voice note, and for the first time since the whole thing started, he did not sound angry. He sounded tired in the way only a man who has worked a full career at the Ministry of Works and still has to borrow money for his daughter’s dream can sound tired.

It was Ada who suggested Lagos. Ada had a cousin’s boyfriend who worked with a consumer protection lawyer in Ikeja, the kind of young lawyer who takes cases like this for a cut of whatever is recovered, because that is the only business model that makes sense when the client’s whole savings is the thing under discussion.

They travelled by road, Somto and her father, an eight hour journey squeezed into a Sienna with six other passengers, the driver playing Portable at a volume that made conversation about anything, let alone fraud, nearly impossible. Somto watched Enugu’s hills disappear behind them and Lagos announce itself the way it always does, first with the smell of exhaust fumes near Ore, then with the sheer, relentless noise of it once they hit the outskirts.

The lawyer, a soft spoken young man named Barrister Uche, listened to their whole story without interrupting, then said something that surprised Somto with how simple it was.

This is not the first Uncle Presh case I have heard this month, and it will not be the last, he said. The trick is not cleverness, madam, it is confidence. He is banking on the fact that shame will keep families quiet.

That line stayed with Somto longer than anything else in the whole saga. Shame had almost kept them quiet too. Papa Chidi had wanted, in the first week, to just absorb the loss quietly, to tell relatives that the Canada plan had merely been “postponed,” because admitting they had been scammed felt like admitting he had failed his daughter twice, once by not having the money honestly available, and again by trusting the wrong man with it.

The case is still moving slowly through the system, the way these things do in Nigeria, where justice arrives with the same unpredictability as NEPA light, sometimes bright and sudden, mostly a long, frustrating wait in the dark. Uncle Presh Travels and Consults has since shut its Enugu office. Somto heard, through the same neighbourhood grapevine that never lies for long, that a new office has opened in Uyo under a slightly different name.

Somto did not get to Manitoba that year. She got something else instead, a harder, more permanent education, the kind that does not come with a letterhead or a framed certificate. She learned that the diaspora dream, sold so beautifully in adverts and agency offices with their fake Canadian flags, has its own hustlers waiting at the door, dressed sharper than anyone else in the room, speaking the most convincing English in town.

These days, when a younger cousin mentions wanting to “japa,” Somto does not discourage them. She just tells them one thing first, the same thing she wishes someone had told her father before he handed over four hundred and eighty thousand naira for a dream that was never real: verify the school yourself, call the embassy yourself, and never let anyone’s confidence do the thinking your own eyes were built to do.