The Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, has come out to give reasons why the issuance of passports by the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) is been delayed in recent times.
The upper legislative chamber resolved to investigate reasons why there are delays in the issuance and renewal of passports by the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS).
The Senate directed its Committee on Interior to probe into the delay in the issuance and renewal of passports.
It also asked the committee to probe the contract for the printing of passports by the NIS, Naija News learnt.
The directive, which was issued on Tuesday at the resumption of plenary, followed a motion by Senator Uche Ekwunife who said Nigerians are facing hardship and stress in getting their passports.
According to the lawmaker, Nigerians now spend between three to six months to get their passports from the NIS, despite the six weeks timeline given for processing.
However, in a related development, Aregbesola revealed that the delay in the issuance of passports in the country is caused by a few corrupt officials in the NIS.
According to him, these few corrupt officials in the NIS have undermined the effort of the agency to bring back integrity and sanity to passports application in the country.
The minister made this position known in Oyo Town while inaugurating the NIS passport front office in the town on Tuesday evening.
Speaking about the excuse of shortage of passport booklets, the minister submitted that “It’s a lie and an excuse by few corrupt officials of the service to extort the applicants.
“One of the challenges facing NIS as regards passports application are the few corrupt officials of the service who are undermining the efforts of the service at sanitising process and bringing integrity to passports application.
“These unscrupulous people are making the situation difficult by the day, if people did not tolerate them, they will not exist again.
“They are the one spreading the rumour that there is no booklets in order to continue to extort the applicants.
“We did not have shortage of booklets at any given time; we have enough booklets to meet the need of the people.
“There are more than enough booklets in our production schedule.”
Aregbesola, who said getting an international passport is a right of every Nigerian, urged the general public to desist from patronising such corrupt officers of the NIS.
He acknowledges that while the NIS is trying to improve its services, the challenges currently facing immigration service included the dearth of offices to enrol applicants for data capturing. as well as the construction of more passport front offices.
He said about 5,000 applicants waiting for data capturing in Ibadan centre would be offloaded to the new centre in Oyo, to reduce the challenge of waiting period of data capturing by applicants.
“There is a limit to the number of applicants any passport office can attend to in a day, thus making it impossible to urgently attend to all the applicants necessitating the long waiting period.
“Ibadan can only attend to 450 applicants in a day and that is why we need several locations like this one in Oyo,” he added.
