The Assistant Comptroller-General of Immigration in charge of Planning and Statistics, Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Dora Amahian, has said 7,500 passports are still awaiting collection in Oyo state.
ACGI Amahian dropped this hint in Ibadan while speaking during a working visit to the Oyo state Command of the Nigeria Immigration Service in Ibadan, on Wednesday.
According to ACGI her, some of the passports had been produced since 2020 with their owners yet to show up to collect them from the Ibadan NIS office.
“We have about 7,500 uncollected passports in Oyo State and we do not want them to expire in our hands because if they do, applicants will have to pay money for fresh applications”, she said.
She said, “In times past, there had been unpalatable comments about how applicants were made to wait endlessly for passport issuance. We want to tell you that NIS has been issuing passports but people don’t come to pick them up”.
She disclosed that the Nigeria Immigration Service has been sending text messages to the applicants with only a few of them have been responding to the messages.
The NIS Assistant Comptroller-General stressed that some applicants submitted wrong telephone numbers thereby making the SMS sent to them undelivered.
Appealing to applicants, who had applied for passports in the last 6 to 9 months in Oyo State to come and pick up their passports, she assured Nigerians that passports would be issued to fresh applicants within six weeks, she said.
