By Wilson Adekumola
The Nigeria Immigration Service has disclosed that about 97,000 passport booklets issued were yet to be claimed in the 36 states nationwide including Federal Capital Territory.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria, the Service Public Relations Officer, Comptroller of Immigration, Tony Akuneme, made this disclosure while speaking with th the News Agency of Nigeria on Friday in Abuja.
Mr Akuneme said that the service recently found out that Lagos State had half of the uncollected passports, stating that there was also a danger that half of the owners of the uncollected passports could not be reached due to a lack of proper documentation because of third-party involvement.
He equally stressed that the reason for a state of emergency declaration was to draw the attention of the media so they could deepen the process for the service as a lot of people do not know if their passports were ready for collection.
“Some of them engaged agents to help them in their passport processing and these agents might be doing this for a lot of persons.
“They end up dropping wrong contacts and thereby making it difficult to reach out to the owners of these passports when they are ready for collection. This is a big challenge,” he said.
NAN reported that the Acting Comptroller General, NIS, Caroline Adepoju, recently declared a state of emergency on passport issues across the country.
The SPRO said that the service recently found out that most applicants’ complaints are due to some human factors and technical factors which included the slow speed of the Internet.
He said, the CG didn’t want to leave anyone in doubt as to the issue of passport processing being her core area of interest.
“That’s how she came about that term of declaring a state of emergency in the passport issues.
“When the acting CG assumed office, she made it very clear that she was going to focus on passport reforms and staff welfare, “he said.
He explained that the Lagos state Governor is willing to partner with the CG in terms of expanding the passport services in Lagos State.
“So, we went to Lagos State Governor to help in terms of giving us office space where we can set up front desk offices and immediately, the governor was very positive in his response
“Lagos is a tourist place and immigration has a key role to play in the mind of anybody visiting the state.
“So it was a welcome development and you can see that the state of emergency that was declared is already yielding fruits as the governor accepted CGs request on land allocation to build staff quarters in Lagos,” he said.
Akuneme, however, called on the media to tell Nigerians that people should not think there were no passport booklets.
He said, “There are booklets issued that are not collected. It is ironic, we don’t have problem of booklet, we don’t have shortage of booklets.
“What we have had in the last one or two years is a sudden upsurge in the number of Nigerians wanting to travel. We felt it was also related to COVID-19,” he said.
Mr Akuneme assured that the result would be instant as more facilities were going to be put in place to curtail any challenges of passport issuance across the country.
