Hurdle clears after months of hassle
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Passport issuance fetches the treasury tonnes of naira yearly. The problem is not a lack of funds. So why should Muhammadu Buhari sit on passport, make it scarce, and deprive citizens of the freedom to travel?
What gives Buhari, Nigeria’s laziest President, the feudal authority to trample the law and trample citizens?
This has been the poser and the agitation among the (educated) middle class since 2020. They have been railing against Buhari and the passport system he superintends.
And the outcry has now led to hundreds of thousands of new passport booklets being acquired by the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) to issue to citizens eager to travel and explore new horizons after months of frustration.
Nigerians speculate that the scarcity of passport booklets is part of the plot by Buhari, whom they do not trust, and who they see as angling to prevent them from leaving a country where insecurity and joblessness fuel the desire to get out.
Nigerians, famous globalists
Nigerians are famous globalists. They love to go to other countries all over the world for schooling, pleasure or for emigration. This had been their lifestyle long before Buhari brought his myopia, incompetence, and troubles to Aso Rock in 2015.
There are three million Nigerians officially registered in Italy alone. Not counting the undocumented.
Resilient Nigerians naturalise in Cape Verde. They live, work, marry, and thrive in the small island nation off the coast of West Africa – which does not even like fellow Africans and routinely deports people of colour.
There is no country in the world, big or tiny, where there is no Nigerian.
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Buhari’s own travels
Buhari himself has travelled 130 times to 36 countries altogether, spending about 308 days since he became President on May 29, 2015, according to a tally by Daily Trust in an editorial on December 10, 2021.
After the publication, Buhari junketed to Turkey on December 16 where he spent four days, during which Nigeria’s laziest President in history revelled in his 79th birthday festivity together with his wife, six Ministers, and other senior officials.
In total, by December 19, 2021, he had travelled to 37 countries where he spent about 312 days.
Another tracking by SaharaReporters shows that Buhari – who enjoys dodging his official responsibilities – gallivanted to nine countries in the three months between September and December 2021.
He travelled to
- New York (September)
- Adis Ababa (October)
- Riyadh (October)
- Scotland (October)
- London (November)
- Paris (November)
- Pretoria (November)
- Dubai (December)
- Istanbul (December).
“On cost-benefit terms, the dividends of President Buhari’s visits have not been as spectacular as Nigerians expected. We are yet to see the direct foreign investments translate into jobs for our unemployed young men and women.
“Also, we have not witnessed the race by foreign industrial concerns to establish industries that will help boost technology transfer, raise our exports and gross domestic product,” Daily Trust said in the editorial.
“In fact, it is curious that while the president all too often finds reasons to embark on foreign trips at the slightest opportunity, he almost always needs to be persuaded to visit the states and communities within Nigeria that are deserving of his presence.
“Indeed, it has been observed that on the occasion he visits the states, he hardly stays long enough to make them meaningful to the people.
“We believe that in the remaining months of his tenure, President Buhari should cut down drastically, his foreign trips and should travel abroad only where it is absolutely necessary for him to do so.”
Availability of passport
Diaspora Nigerians have not been able to obtain new passports or renew old ones, depriving them of the paperwork to get jobs in countries such as The Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.
But Acting NIS Comptroller General Isa Idris has announced the acquisition of passport booklets and given an assurance that all the hassle in getting a passport will be cleared by March.
He blamed the delay in passport production on the pandemic, global lockdowns, and the difficulty in accessing foreign exchange (forex).
He said an enhanced e-passport embedded with improved features has been launched as part of efforts to address the problem.
A pilot of the new e-passport has been run in London, Kano, Port Harcourt, and Ibadan, Idris confirmed in a virtual conference reported by PREMIUM TIMES.
His words: “Just Friday [December 31, 2021] we received a total of 45,000 booklets towards clearing the backlogs and in December alone, we received more than 100,000 booklets which we have continued to distribute across the passport centres nationwide.
“This is not just for Nigerians in Nigeria alone but for those in the Diaspora as well.
“But with the introduction of the enhanced e-passport, we are good to go in our efforts towards addressing the scarcity. This enhanced e-passport is a great improvement on the biometric passport technology which we adopted as a country in 2007.
“It is a strategic step towards curbing forgery, impersonation and other forms of fraud associated with obtaining travel documents under the old Machine Readable Passport regime.”
Apply only online
Idris pleaded with Nigerians to apply only online and stop physical contact with immigration officials to avoid corruption.
“We have continued to try to stop personal contacts with our officials. My predecessor started to break the jinx and we are continuing on that.”
He condemned what he described as the last-minute rush for either renewal or fresh application for passports, saying applicants for renewal can apply for it six months to the expiration of their current passports.
He said the NIS is working hard to ensure full compliance with the three-week duration for renewal and six-week waiting period for fresh applications.
There is nowhere in the world where passports are produced in 24 hours except in emergency situations, he stressed.
“The waiting period is for us to validate the addresses provided by the applicants. So Nigerians should not forget that they have six months to renew their passport.
“They should not wait till it expires, and of course, there are other emergencies, and there is a window for them.”
Idris said one of the core responsibilities of the NIS is to protect the borders and that it would not allow itself to be reduced to a passport production agency.
With more than 5,000 land borders and shorelines, the deployment of technology is the best way to tackle the problems, he added.
According to him, the NIS will leave no stone unturned to ensure that Nigerians can sleep with their two eyes closed, as improved border management has been part of his three-point agenda since he mounted the saddle in September last year.
He complained about poor funding and said the NIS is trying to secure approval to spend part of its revenue on operations.
He said workers not motivated will find it hard to shun corruption and he is determined to improve welfare for greater productivity and efficiency.
Idris pleaded with Nigerians and particularly the media for cooperation and support, saying there are dedicated channels for complaints about the services of the NIS and the conduct of its officials.