Interior minister Rauf Aregbesola says few corrupt officials are undermining the efforts of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) at sanitising the process and bringing integrity to passport application.

Mr Aregbesola disclosed this in Oyo town while inaugurating the NIS passports front office on Tuesday evening.

Meanwhile, the Senate has launched an investigation into the circumstances leading to the delay in issuing passports by the NIS.

The minister said NIS did not, at any given time, experience a shortage of passport booklets, adding it was “a lie and an excuse by few corrupt officials of the service to extort the applicants.”

“One of the challenges facing NIS as regards passport application are the few corrupt officials of the service who are undermining the efforts of the service at sanitising process and bringing integrity to passport application,” the interior minister added.

Mr Aregbesola explained that “these unscrupulous people are making the situation difficult by the day” but stressed that “if people did not tolerate them, they will not exist again.”

He further stated, “They are the one spreading the rumour that there are 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 needs of the people. There are more than enough booklets in our production schedule.”

The minister, however, appealed to Nigerians to stop patronising the touts and report any NIS officials manipulating applicants for money and stated that NIS was improving its services, noting that only few countries could boast of the type of Nigerian passport, claiming it “is one of the best in the world.”

Mr Aregbesola said the challenges currently facing immigration service included a dearth of offices to enrol applicants for data capturing. The minister said the challenges were gradually tackled, especially with constructing more passport front offices.

Mr Aregbesola said the inauguration of a new office in Oyo town would reduce the congestion in the Ibadan centre, revealing that about 5,000 applicants waiting for data capturing in the Ibadan centre would be offloaded to the new centre in Oyo to reduce the challenge of a 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 said.

The minister said that getting a passport was the right of all Nigerians in Nigeria and those outside the country, assuring them that the service would not relent in its mandate of providing passports to all Nigerians.

(NAN)