The Interior Minister, Rauf Aregbesola says there is no shortage of passport booklets in the country.
According to him, with the supplies of booklets available with the Nigerian Immigration Service, there can never be a shortage.
However, he said what the country was contending with was ‘human challenges’.
Aregbesola spoke during the decoration of the acting Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Immigration Service, Idris Jere, in Abuja on Wednesday.
He said, “I say to you that there is no shortage of booklets in the country, we may have human challenges. The truth is that, in terms of the supply of booklets we have on the ground, there cannot be a shortage of booklets.
“I read lamentations on social media and I want to say nobody can access a Nigerian passport without going online. It is not possible for those who go online to not be serviced, although some still patronize touts to access the online process. This is because of the difficulty we have managing ourselves which is why they have refused to go through it the proper way. ”
Explaining why some applicants get long appointment dates, he said this was a result of the volume of applicants in the area.
Aregbesola said, “Depending on the volume of applicants in your chosen station, your appointment period can be short or long. For example, if you’re in Lagos, the Ikoyi passport office has the highest volume of passport seekers in Nigeria, it is almost 50 percent of the entire population of applicants in Nigeria. If you pick Ikoyi, you might have a three months waiting period to have your data captured and other enrollment requirements, whereas it is not so in other places.”
