The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) says in spite of the surge in the number of Nigerians travelling abroad, over 97,000 passports have not been collected across the 36 states including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Of this number, Lagos is responsible for over 48,500 uncollected passports.
The spokesperson for the NIS, Mr Tony Akuneme, disclosed this on Friday in Abuja.
He said the biggest challenge in getting the passports across to the owners is that most of them gave wrong contacts or address thereby making it difficult to reach them.
He said: “Some of them engaged agents to help them in their passport processing and these agents might be doing for a lot 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.”
According to Akunume, the current situation had prompted the new Comptroller General to declare a state of emergency on passport issues.
“When the Acting CG assumed office, she made it very clear that she was going to focus on passport reforms and staff welfare.
“So, we went to Lagos State Governor to help in terms of giving us office space where we can set up front desk offices and immediately the governor was very positive in his response.
”Lagos is a tourist place and immigration has a key role to play in the minds of anybody visiting the state.
“So, it was a welcome development and you can see that the state of emergency that was declared is already yielding fruits as the governor accepted CGs request on land allocation to build staff quarters in Lagos.
“There are booklets issued that are not collected. It is ironical, we don’t have problem of booklet, we don’t have shortage of booklets.
“What we have had in the last one or two years is a sudden upsurge in the number of Nigerians wanting to travel. We felt it was also related to COVID-19,” he said.
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