The Federal Capital Territory (FCT), 36 states, and around 97,000 issued passport booklets, according to the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS).
Tony Akuneme, the Comptroller of Immigration and Service Public Relations Officer (SPRO), made this statement during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Friday in Abuja.
According to Mr. Akuneme, the service recently discovered that Lagos State possessed half of the unclaimed passports.
He added that there was a chance that because of third-party involvement, half of the owners of the uncollected passports could not be located due to a lack of adequate documentation.
Additionally, he stated that the purpose of declaring a state of emergency was to get the media’s attention in order to further the service’s procedures because many individuals do not know when their passports are ready for pickup.
“Some of them engaged agents to help them in their passport processing and these agents might be doing this for a lot of people.
“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.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Caroline Adepoju, the acting comptroller general for the NIS, recently proclaimed a state of emergency on passport-related matters nationwide.
According to the SPRO, the agency recently discovered that the majority of application complaints also concerned some human elements and technological problems, like the sluggish Internet speed.
He claimed that the CG wanted to make it clear that the problem of passport processing was her main area of attention.
“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 claims that the governor of Lagos State is open to working with the CG to increase the availability of 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.
However, according to Mr. Akuneme, the service needs the media to inform Nigerians that there are still passport booklets available.
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.
(NAN)
