Officials at the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) headquarters in Abuja have abandoned a 78-year-old woman’s passport renewal request since November because she refused to pay a N15,000 bribe.
FIJ confirmed that after months of delay, one NIS staff told the septuagenarian’s daughter in a phone conversation to pay N15,000 to “fast-track” the passport’s production process.
The NIS headquarters has received complaints from the aged woman’s daughter at its passport collection and SERVICOM points, but the office has refused to produce the renewed passport booklets to date.
“I had applied for my mum’s international passport renewal in October last year, but there was an issue with the NIN verification at NIMC and all that. Eventually, all the NIN issues were sorted out by November and I was told that it would take two to six weeks,” Tochi Prince-Alaba (not real name) told FIJ on Tuesday.
“A staff who attended to us told us that we should call to find out when the passport was ready because I live in Lagos and my mother is aged.
“I thought the website would be a better option [to track the passport’s production progress], but every time I tried to check the website, I somehow could not find her application. The website kept telling me ‘application not found.’”
NIS STAFF ASKED FOR N15,000 BRIBE
Prince-Alaba told FIJ that the NIS staff who attended to her mother were initially kind and showed concern when they visited the headquarters located in Sauka, Abuja, in October.
This kindness was non-existent when the same staff spoke with her over the phone weeks later.
“It was good that I got someone’s number, but when I called, he sounded completely different. He said that it took up to six weeks for the passport to be ready and if I wanted it to be fast-tracked I should bring N15,000,” she said.
“I said I wasn’t going to do that; I was not going to pay a bribe. He cut me off. They were very kind to mama (when we visited the office earlier) because she’s almost 80; they gave us preference. We weren’t in a hurry because she didn’t plan to travel soon for any medical or urgent reasons. It was just a routine passport renewal, so that when it’s time to travel to visit her grandchildren or something, she would easily travel.
“We were sitting down back in October when he approached us and said that, ‘you are sitting with this elderly woman, let’s take her forward; she doesn’t need to wait the whole day’.
“Within an hour, we were there. There were many young people there, but because she was way older and she had difficulty walking, they just took her in. It was at that point he gave us his number to call him in two weeks, that the passport would be ready. So, when we first called him, we realised there was a challenge with NIN. They made a mistake with her full name and date of birth. We paid and sorted all of that. I called him and he confirmed that her correct data was in the system. As I speak, I can’t reach him anymore. It’s either he blocked me or it was a burner number.
“As soon as I told him that I wasn’t going to pay the N15,000, I couldn’t reach him anymore. He works there because I saw him in uniform and he was inside the office when we met him. When I went in that day, I had already filled in everything online and I just wanted to go through the data capture at their office.
N150,000 EXTORTED FROM APPLICANT WITH NO PASSPORT TO SHOW FOR IT
FIJ found that Prince-Alaba was not the only person who was asked for a bribe before they could get their passports produced.
Prince-Alaba shared that some other applicants paid more money from bribe-seeking NIS officials and they still had to complain about unspecified delays.
“Right there I saw people who said that they filled their application for renewal in January and, within two weeks, it was out. Of course, they all paid something. There was a man there with his wife, screaming at the top of his voice, saying that they had fleeced him of N150,000 and the passport had not been renewed. His issue was that his wife was doing a new passport because the old one carried her maiden name. So, they had to do a change of name and renew the passport,” she explained.
“They are extorting people. Even when you go through the whole process online, we go for capture, but it is at the production stage that they delay the release and issuance of the passport until you pay something. Since then, I have refused and left them. We submitted our application in early November; we are talking about four months now.
“There were a few people at the passport office whose files they couldn’t even find. The man who paid N150,000 was just going up and down, and his wife was blaming him that they might be facing those challenges because he came to report. He did the capture in their Gwagwalada office and came to report the delay at their headquarters. Since August, he doesn’t understand why the passport is still not out, and they had extorted money from him.”
To better understand why her passport renewal was taking too long, Prince-Alaba went to the passport collection desk.
An NIS official only gave her a passport collection slip and asked her if she “had someone following up so that this thing can come out quickly”.
She realised that she might have to wait endlessly because she did not pay that N15,000 bribe to the official who offered to handle her mother’s passport renewal differently.
“I went to complain at the SERVICOM unit where I was asked to fill a form. I filled the form, I wrote everything, they promised to get back to me within three working days, it’s over a week now and nobody has reached out to me,” Prince-Alaba told FIJ.
“Of course, they didn’t give me any number to call. My mother has been travelling since the 1970s.
“As soon as you are driving into the immigration office, the first thing they are asking is, ‘Where are you going to?’ I am always surprised at the question. Are there two offices in that place? I am going into the immigration office and you ask me, ‘Where are you going?’ I sarcastically asked if the immigration office had been moved and they responded ‘no’. They go on to ask if I am going to see anybody. That’s the first thing they ask, implying that there has to be someone in there.”
MORE APPLICANTS CRY OUT AGAINST THE SAME N15,000 ON SOCIAL MEDIA
More applicants have complained about the same NIS office in Abuja repeatedly, and they have taken to social media to express their displeasure.
The cries against the extortionist behaviour of NIS officials in Abuja have fallen on the deaf ears of Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the Minister of Interior.
THE NIS’ RESPONSE
FIJ called three phone numbers connected with the NIS offices in Abuja to speak with a passport control officer or Kemi Nanna Nandap, the Comptroller General of the NIS.
One of the the phone numbers was busy every time while the other two were inoperable.
The NIS had not responded to FIJ’s inquiries via texts and email at press time.
The NIS posted on X on February 22: “The entire process of acquiring the Nigerian International passport, by law, is the EXCLUSIVE responsibility of The Service. We are not unaware of certain individuals, both off and online, touting/parading themselves as “passport plugs”.
“While we always strongly advise Nigerians to ignore and report these self-acclaimed “plugs”, we’ll continue to intensify efforts in fishing out these individuals and those, from within, who keep them in business.”
FIJ has learnt, however, that some of these individuals participating in passport racketeering and extortion work with the NIS itself.
Prince-Alaba says that officials have created a network of racketeers from the gates of NIS offices to their production rooms.
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