Five days after getting a marching order from Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has cleared 55,000 out of the 200,000 international passports awaiting issuance to applicants.
Tunji- Ojo revealed this during a meeting with Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation Minister Betta Edu in Abuja yesterday.
He reassured that once the remaining 145,000 passport backlogs were cleared, it would take new applicants only two weeks to receive the travel document.
The Nation gathered from a source that the biggest challenge to passport issuance is the difficulty NIS faces in linking applicants’ National Identity Numbers(NINs) to their booklets.
The NIS source, who did not want his name in print, said that National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) servers have been down in the past month.
NIMC is the Federal Government agency responsible for the allocation of NIN to Nigerians.
Tunji-Ojo had at a parley with NIS authorities on September 7 maintained that under his watch, Nigerians home and abroad, would not be subjected to hardships and bottlenecks in the process of obtaining passport booklets. He consequently gave them 14 days to issue the pending 200,000 to their owners.
He had said: “Delays in the processing and enrolment of passports in Nigeria have been a source of frustration for citizens, causing significant delays in obtaining crucial travel documents.
“Having to deal with about 200,000 backlogs calls for a national emergency.
“As far as I am concerned, the issue of passport is a national emergency; I keep getting emails daily from Nigerians complaining.”
NIS spokesman Dotun Aridegbe told The Nation that personnel of the service have been working round the clock to ensure that the minister’s order was met.
At the meeting, Edu said a plan by the Federal Government to grant soft loans to widows of NIS, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Nigerian Correctional Service(NCS) and Federal Fire Service personnel that died while on duty.
The Interior and Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation ministries agreed at the meeting to set up a joint to address poverty, insecurity and check the number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) in the country.
A statement by Afonja Ajibola, director of Press in the Ministry of Interior, quoted Tunji-Ojo as saying that the two ministries have a semblance of mandate.
The Interior minister added that collaboration between the two ministries would go a long way in achieving the objectives of the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
He appreciated Edu for broadening the mandate of her ministry to cover vulnerable ex-servicemen under the supervision of his ministry and inmates of correctional facilities.
Earlier, the Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation minister applauded Tunji-Ojo for taking his job head-on. She added that inmates of correctional facilities would start enjoying improved skill acquisition programmes.