The Minister of Interior, Alhaji Rauf Aregbesola, says the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) produced over 1.7 million passports in 2022.
Aregbesola disclosed on Thursday this while featuring in the 64th edition of the State House briefing, organised by the Presidential Communications Team, in Abuja.
The Minister, who described the figure as a landmark achievement, rated the ministry and agencies under it at over 80 per cent in terms of performance within the period under review.
He said some major reforms and digitisation of passport issuance administration, including a temporary electronic passport, had been introduced.
“We are digitising (digitalising) the process; my plan was to fully digitise (digitalising) the Ikoyi registry by Dec. 2022 but I could not fully achieve that.
“What does that mean? When this process is concluded, an applicant does not need to bring anything anymore; you complete your process online completely and, by that time, you don’t need an agent.
“There can’t be racketeering; I am on it and I want to guarantee that we will do it before we leave.
“That temporary passport thing is done; we have the passport but we have some issues with our sister ministry—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; we are solving it.”
According to him, the temporary passport will enable Nigerian citizens outside Nigeria who have emergencies to return home when they don’t have current/valid passports.
He said it entailed returning home with an expired passport.
“Much as that won’t be a problem for us to take at our reception desk, some airlines could be difficult; I can even tell you that we are discussing with South Africa now.
“South Africa does not allow the use of expired passports as a nation, contrary to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) regulation.
“ICAO says that every citizen of a nation dead or alive cannot be denied entry to his home; which is logical anyway.
“But as at the last time I treated a file from them, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they are insisting that if one’s passport is not current, one cannot be taken in or out of South Africa’s space.
“It is their policy; you cannot deny a nation its national policy and programme.
“So, to avoid that, we introduced what is called ‘temporary electronic passport’; it is a one way passport to return home.”
He said that under the temporary passport regime, citizens who had the data pages of their passports could bring them to the embassy.
The minister said, upon the payment of the appropriate fee, such citizens would get temporary electronic passports that were almost exactly the same as their own passports.
“But it does not have more than one page to take you home; when you hold the electronic passport, you cannot go anywhere but home.
“Unfortunately, we are still in negotiation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; by Dec. 31 last year, we produced over 1.7 million passports.
“In the annals of Nigeria, that has not happened; as I am talking to you, we have over 200,000 booklets in our store.
“We are not denying the fact that there are human-induced challenges; if you look at the number of applications, vis a vis the passport produced, we are over 80 per cent in performance.
“In any way, take it as given that we produced over 1.7 million passports last year.”
The Minister said that a Presidential directive had been issued with regards to the domestication of passport production.
Aregbesola also said that the ministry, in collaboration with the NIS, had empanelled a ‘project steering committee’ with the mandate to actualise the goal.
