FG Reiterates Commitment To Ease Passport Availability For Nigerians

……As Aregbesola Commissions Ilesa Passport Front Office and Production Centre

The Federal Government on Tuesday restated her commitment to ameliorating the challenges encountered by Nigerians in applying for and obtaining the Nigerian Passport, through improved service delivery and streamlining of its operations.

,,,,,The government is also working assiduously to adequately address the growing number of Nigerians who need the passport for other purposes.

Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, stated this in Ilesa, at the commissioning of the Ilesa Passport Front Office and Production Centre, of the Nigeria Immigration Service in Ilesa, Osun State.

Aregbesola noted that the surge in the number of applications necessitates the establishment of more passport front offices across the country, which is born out of the determination of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to further make the process seamless.

,,,,,The Minister said: “In recent years, there has been an upsurge in passport demands by Nigerians. The first factor in this upsurge was the COVID-19 pandemic that affected our production schedule, due to restrictions on human movement. This created a backlog that we were trying to clear when an unprecedented number of Nigerians now decided to travel outside the country and applied for passport, thereby compounding the backlog challenge.

“Then of course, the panic buying syndrome kicked in. Many people who had no immediate need of passport then started applying, creating a deluge of applications. Thankfully, that is behind us now. The backlogs have all been cleared and we are producing on schedule in all our centres.

,,,,,”Fresh application will take six weeks after biometric data capture, while renewal requires just three weeks. To respond to the challenge, we increased our production capacity. In 2021, we produced one million booklets. Last year, we increased production to 1.8 million,