Chairman of BUA Group, Abdul Samad Rabiu, has recounted how he was denied entry into South Africa after discovering that his visa expired a day before arrival, while European travellers were reportedly allowed into the country without visas.

Rabiu shared the experience on Thursday while speaking at the Africa CEO Forum held in Kigali.

‘I Was Turned Back to Lagos’

According to the billionaire businessman, the incident happened in February 2025 when he travelled from Lagos to Cape Town for the Mining Indaba conference.

Rabiu explained that he arrived in South Africa early in the morning and only discovered at the immigration desk that his visa had expired a day earlier.

“I had a personal experience. Last year February, I was travelling to Cape Town for the mining Indaba. And as we landed. I left at night from Lagos to Cape Town. We arrived at 6 in the morning,” he said.

“As we arrived, we went to the immigration. I tendered my passport, and the immigration officer looked at it and was like, where is your visa, and I said, ‘My visa is there’. Unknown to me, my visa had expired the day before.”

He blamed the situation partly on his travel crew for failing to confirm the visa validity before departure.

“Unfortunately, our crew did not check the visa to ensure the visa were valid. We were there for four hours, but at the end of the day, I had to turn back. I was turned back to Lagos,” he added.

‘Europeans Entered Freely’

Rabiu, however, said what troubled him most was watching passengers from Europe enter South Africa freely without visas while he, an African travelling within Africa, was denied access.

“But the issue is, while we were waiting to see whether we would be able to get access to the countries without the visas, there were like three international flights from Europe. All three flights were mostly Europeans,” he said.

“I was standing there by the immigration desk, and every passenger on those three flights went into Cape Town without any visa.”

The businessman stressed that he accepted responsibility for travelling with an expired visa but insisted that the broader issue reflects the difficulties Africans still face moving across the continent.

“I do not have a problem with the fact that I was there without the visa and I was returned. I took full responsibility of that,” he stated.

“I had an issue with being an African in Africa, being turned away because I do not have a visa and foreigners from other continents were coming in and were allowed to enter without a visa. This must change.”

AfCFTA ‘Not Working as It Should’

Rabiu also criticised the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area framework, saying many African countries still create barriers that frustrate regional business expansion.

According to him, BUA Group encountered several administrative obstacles while trying to expand trade operations across African markets under the AfCFTA arrangement.

“At BUA Group, as we expanded our regional investment, we actively sought to supply several African markets under the AfCFTA framework,” he said.

“While some countries embraced the spirit of agreement, others were less supportive in practice, with administrative barriers, legacy import structures limiting our ability to participate fully in regional trade.”

He added that the uneven implementation of the trade agreement continues to weaken Africa’s economic integration goals.

“So really, AfCFTA is not working as it should. Because I had a personal experience in one of the countries that we tried to penetrate, we were actually frustrated,” Rabiu said.

The businessman described AfCFTA as one of the world’s most ambitious economic integration projects, noting that its success depends largely on practical execution rather than policy promises alone.