The Nigeria government led President Muhammadu Buhari has deployed hidden and unhidden cameras to all passport offices across the country to check against passport racketeering and corruption.
Addressing journalists on Thursday after a meeting with all passport control officers in 42 passport offices nationwide and immigration attaches in foreign missions who joined virtually, the Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola said efforts are on to embed security operatives both seen and unseen, in all passport offices.
He said: “They will wear body cameras. They will detect and report any form of solicitations, inflation, improper communications, extortion, diversion, hoarding and corruption”.
He warned that those caught in corrupt practices will be dealt with according to the law.
The Minister further disclosed that an ombudsman will also be created for members of the public to receive complaints and reports on officers trying to deviate from prescribed guidelines and subversion of the process.
He said: “Therefore, I am declaring a zero-tolerance stance to all forms of touting. No applicant will be made to pay any illegitimate fees”.
The passport renewal and acquisition process has been for a long riddled with corruption at all level.
The Minister said the entire passport application process by the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) will be witnessing an entire turnaround to six weeks, so as to ensure seamless, transparent, as well as accord human dignity to applicants and fulfil citizenship integrity, in line with the mandate of the Ministry of Interior.
Aregbesola in his speech titled ‘A NEW DAWN IN PASSPORT APPLICATION PROCESSING’, said: “We have had several challenges in the past, including shortage of booklets, touting, racketeering, inflating the cost, passports being issued to ineligible persons, among others. It has become imperative therefore to review our operations and rejig our system, in order to be able to offer excellent services to our clients.”
Highlights of his meeting with the Comptroller General of Immigration, Mohammad Babandede, Passport Officers, as well as the attaches in Nigeria Missions abroad, according to Aregbesola include the creation of special centres for expedited services.
These special centres are to run on a public-private partnership basis. This has already taken off in Abuja and 10 more will be opened in the coming weeks as more of such centres will be opened all over the country. Our goal is to have one in each local government, university campuses, institutions of higher learning and other places.
He also said the timeline will be fixed for every application such as the collection date which will be six weeks, comparable to what obtains in other countries, that will allow for enough time to investigate and validate personal information supplied by the applicants.
He said for henceforth applicants will have no basis for further communication with officers, other than to complete their application process and leave the venue, with the date for the collection of their passports or any challenge to the application, will be communicated to them.
He said, with these changes to check corruption, “It is my firm belief that we will arrive at a new dawn in passport application processing.”
He called for the support and maximum cooperation of all passport officers so to make a more significant contribution to national development.
He charged that: “It should be our personal and collective goal to leave an institution better than we met it.”
Aregbesola who expressed gratitude to President Muhammadu Buhari for his consistent support for the Ministry of Interior and all its agencies also commended the Controller General of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Mohammad Babandede for his tireless efforts and the unprecedented success the agency has recorded under his leadership.
Aregbesola lauded all the officers who are sacrificially serving to man the nation’s borders and do the business of the agency under very challenging conditions. He said: ‘I must thank all our partners, without whose efforts and contributions our exertions would have been in vain.”
Earlier, the Comptroller General, Nigeria Immigration Service, Mohammad Babandede said the need to reduce the waiting period for applicants led to the new review.
