Tourism, student mobility, spouses married to a French national: delivery times have exceeded several months. The consulate pleads overload.
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Obtaining a visa for France has become a real way of the cross in Senegal. Aïda*, 39 -year -old French, had never imagined that the procedure would be so long for her husband, father of her 3 -year -old child, with whom she has been in a relationship for 2010 and married for a year. The request for a long -stay visa was filed with the Dakar consulate on June 20, 2022, but since, no new.
“I don’t stop sending emails, but I am not even answered,” complains the mother, domiciled in the Paris region, who worries that her son will make her first school year, Thursday 1 er September, without his dad. “I do not know if they realize the impact of their delay. Families are separated,” Rales Aïda, who multiplies the back and forth between France and Senegal so that her husband can see her little boy.
The delays recognized by the French Embassy in Senegal in a statement published on social networks on July 26. “The Consulate General faces an increase of more than 250 % of short stay visa requests from the pre-Cavid situation. We understand that this generates a lot of impatience and frustration, which we regret,” justified French diplomacy, which did not follow up on the requests of the world.
“We really do everything to reduce processing deadlines and restore passports as soon as possible, in a completely unprecedented context of activity recovery,” she says. The pressure is particularly strong in Dakar with the multiple requests for study visas which must be processed during the summer, to which are added those of the many Franco-Senegalese families.
“Disarm consular services”
For Karim Ben Cheikh, MP for the ninth district of French people from abroad (Nuts), “consular staff do not have the means to do their work well”. Just appointed Special Rapporteur of the State’s External External Action Budget for the Finance Committee, he points to a “policy of reducing personnel in the consulates, with 30 % of positions removed for ten years.”
During a hearing in the Senate on July 28, the Minister Delegate for the French abroad, Olivier Becht, had himself noted that France had “disarmed [his] consular services in recent years”.
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