Since assuming office, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the minister of interior, has made multiple commitments, especially as it concerns passport issuance and the operations of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS).

One of those commitments was the issuance of passports within two weeks of application. In a September 5 interview, Tunji-Ojo said the ministry was creating a portal on its website to enable citizens to lodge complaints and track their passport if it had yet to be issued to them in the two-week timeframe.

He said the page was being created and would be up in two weeks, and that delays traced to any officers would bring about repercussions.

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“I assure you that it is not going to be business as usual. Part of what we are doing at the moment is creating a page on our website. I believe in the next two weeks it should be up. And within the next couple of days, the social media platforms will be up,” said the minister.

“What it means basically is that any Nigerian, if you apply for your passport and it goes beyond two weeks before your passport is issued to you, you can send us your enrollment number and the specific passport office. There are officers now that have been delegated to that responsibility.”

It’s been over a month, and there is no such page on either the Ministry of Interior or NIS’ website.

Passport collection time has also not been made to reflect the two-week timeframe for processing and issuance, and money is still the only language to use to be treated to an efficient process. FIJ found all this in a visit to NIS’ Alausa office on Wednesday.

Tunji-Ojo has, no doubt, recorded some success since his assumption of office. On September 7, he issued a directive to clear the 204,332 passport application backlog in immigration offices across the country in two weeks. While they were unable to meet the stipulated deadline, by the fourth week, the NIS announced that the backlog had been cleared.

“91,981 passport booklets have been collected so far. There are 112,351 others not yet collected,” they announced, urging citizens to go pick up their passports.

On Wednesday, FIJ visited the NIS Alausa office. As usual, it was crowded with people looking to register, capture data and collect passports, and although staff said the crowd was not as bad anymore, it did not make it any easier for applicants who waited under the sun for hours.

“I thought that if I came early, I’d be attended to quickly. I’ve been here since 7 am just to collect my passport. It was supposed to be ready in August, but it wasn’t until October,” one lady said, before adding that she wished she hadn’t submitted her slip.

“I would have paid somebody to fast-track the process for me, but I have already submitted my slip. It is faster if you know somebody or pay them.”

She was not wrong. I met a young man who only applied for a passport last month and was issued it yesterday. How is your passport ready? I asked, to which he replied, “I had to pay.”

“If you pay, you can get it faster. I paid N25,000, which is why I was able to pick it up in such a short time. My friend, who applied in January, only just got his. He didn’t pay.”

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Two more people who spoke with FIJ and collected their passports also said they paid to fast-track the process. Those who didn’t waited months, some as long as eight months, to be issued, and when they finally arrived to pick it up, they stood long hours in a queue as preference was given to those who paid to fast-track the process.

PASSPORT COLLECTION DATE: SIX MONTHS POST-APPLICATION

On Thursday, FIJ called NIS to inquire about the implementation of the two-week passport issuance policy. The officer who responded said that, like other Nigerians, the NIS had only heard the information.

“The implementation, I’m yet to see. They say things that they want to do, and we as Nigerians are waiting to see. Already, there is a programme on ground that says that when you are doing a renewal, it’s for three weeks, and if you are doing it fresh, it’s for six weeks, and then if you are doing a change of data, it’s for three months,” he said.

“For the old process, I know. For the new process, I don’t know. We can only quote what the minister said.”

FIJ was, however, able to sight the confirmation slip of an applicant whose data was captured on Wednesday, and the collection date stipulated was six months’ time, in March 2024.

When FIJ told the officer about this, he advised the applicant to return to the immigration office and confirm. “It must have been a mistake,” he said. Fresh passports take only six weeks, and renewal takes three weeks, he repeated.

FIJ is convinced that this was not an error, as multiple other applicants who received their confirmation slip at the Alausa office on Wednesday received similar timelines.

Furthermore, FIJ called the Ministry of Interior to inquire about the two-week application turnaround time and report the six-month issuance timeline recorded at the NIS Alausa office, but the representative redirected us to the NIS for information.