97,000 Passports Uncollected Nationwide – Immigration Service

The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) says about 97,000 passport booklets issued were uncollected in the 36 states nationwide including Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The Service Public Relations Officer, (SPRO) Comptroller of Immigration, Mr Tony Akuneme said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Friday in Abuja.

Akuneme said that the service recently found out that Lagos State had half of the uncollected passports.

He said that there was also a danger that half of the owners of the uncollected passports could not be reached due to lack of proper documentation because of a third party involvement.

He also said that the essence of state of emergency declaration was to draw attention of the media so they could deepened the process for the service as alot of people do not know if their passport were ready for collection.

“Some of them engaged agents to help them in their passport processing and these agents might be doing for alot 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.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Acting Comptroller General, NIS, Mrs Caroline Adepoju had recently declared state of emergency on passport issues across the country.

The SPRO said that the service recently found out that most applicants complains also bothers on some human factor and technical factor which included slow speed of Internet.

According to him, the CG didn’t want to leave anyone in doubt as to the issue of passport processing being her core area of interest.