Nigerians living abroad face delays in obtaining passports, but Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo has promised to address this issue.
He promised to reduce the difficulty of obtaining a passport for people living abroad by setting up more passport desk offices globally by February 2024.
Speaking as a guest on Arise News on Thursday, the Minister said something.
Nigerians living abroad who had been apprehended would receive their passports in three weeks, according to Tunji-Ojo.
His focus has now turned to those living abroad, he said, having cleared the backlogs in the nation.
The one passport office in Canada is unacceptable, according to Tunji-Ojo. In order to accomplish this, we must work with private organisations as the government may not have the resources to open passport offices everywhere in the world. In the UK, for example, you have to travel to London to get your passport, wherever you may be. Corruption also arises when there is an excessive demand for something.
We plan to have passport front offices worldwide by February of the following year, I promise. We are also exerting great effort to guarantee that Nigerians who have already been apprehended and living abroad will receive their passports. We are currently concentrating on those living abroad after resolving the domestic problems. We’ll make sure that, within the next two to three weeks, the people who were apprehended receive their passports.
In her speech, the minister discussed how adopting technology would greatly aid in decreasing corruption in the nation’s passport administration.
In his words, “Avoiding human contact as much as possible is the best way to prevent corruption.” In addition to improving our service delivery, we must implement technology to stop this. Additionally, Nigerians ought to refrain from using proxies to obtain their passports.
