The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) appealed to members of the public to cooperate with the Service in order to improve service delivery, especially in the area of passport administration and issuance. This was made known on Sunday by the Acting Comptroller General of Immigration, Isa Jere Idris, adding that travelers should apply for passports early to avoid any passport issuance delay.
According to him, “The integration of the online appointment system with the existing online payment system, has restored orderliness to the passport offices to a large extent, as applicants can now make payment and choose the appointment date and time which is convenient to them, thereby reducing the time they would have spent at the passport offices as each passport office has been allocated with a daily appointment capacity which was arrived at, based on analysis.
“It is pertinent to note that between January and April 2022, a total of 478,650 booklets have been distributed across the globe, and I can assure you that more than 10,000 Nigerians have benefited from this initiative and it is still ongoing”.
He said since resuming office as acting Comptroller General in September 2021, his team has been working endlessly to clear the backlogs of passports applications, he noted that the backlogs were caused by the COVID 19 pandemic which affected progress worldwide.
Idris said as of April 2022, the backlogs in Nigeria have been reduced to 33,625 while the backlogs abroad are currently at 9,661.