Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has said Nigerians should not fear any delay in collection of passport as there are over 80,000 passport booklets waiting to be issued.
The Minister, speaking at a media parley in Abuja on Friday, said in recent time the passport booklets in reserve have not gone below 50,000.
He said all backlogs of passports have been cleared, noting that the Nigeria Immigration Service, (NIS) no longer owes its service providers regarding printing and supply of passports.
Tunji-Ojo said: “We now have about 80,000 passports in stock, both the 32 pages and the 70 pages.”
He promised that Nigerians in diaspora would henceforth enjoy seamless acquisition of passports, especially those in United States, Canada and United Kingdom, disclosing that this would come into effect as the Federal Government activates Automated Application system by October.
The Minister said: “Henceforth Nigerians in the diaspora would not need to travel from one country to another to obtained Passports, saying the era of wasting working hours, resources and risking their lives on long journey is gone.
“We are going to do a pre-launch of this automated systems very soon. And by October they will be fully operational. We have a situation in London where we have 16,000 Nigerians applying for Passports, and the capacity of our systems in the Embassy is about 200.
“But now that we have this systems in place, Nigerians would not have to embark on different journeys across the world for Passport acquisition,” Tunji-Ojo said.
Tunji-Ojo while justifying the increase in passports fees, said it is a matter of cost benefits analysis especially “when you look at the rate of dollar compared to naira”.
He also said the increase didn’t affect the cost of passports outside Nigeria, adding that the increase was only about 45 percent.
He noted that the government is not exploiting Nigerians but only increased to cover the cost of procurement of passports.
“If at all government should subsidize anything, I don’t think it should be passports. The increase is just from N35,000 to N50,000 naira. No increase outside Nigeria.”
Michael Olugbode
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