Aregbesola promises that Nigerian passport regime will be fully digitised by December

INTERIOR minister Rauf Aregbesola has revealed that the full digitisation of Nigeria's  passport processes would be completed by December by which time there would be no need for contact between applicants and immigration officers.

In January 2019, Nigeria decided to increase the tenure of its Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) international passports to 10 years from the current five years. These enhanced passports can be obtained either as 32 or 64-page documents but for now, the process is yet to be fully automated.

Speaking in Abuja yesterday, Mr Aregbesola said that full digitisation would completely eliminate any form of contact between passport applicants and immigration officers. Adding this will eliminate the inherent corruption in the system, the minister said that the project was one of the priorities of President Muhammadu Buhari's administration.

Mr Aregbesola said: “We are on it and by December we will remove any manual processing of passports. Now, we still have some manual part, because files are still manually opened but by December, particularly in the busiest passport processing centres, there will be no manual segment of the passport processing, every part of it will be digitised."

According to the minister, there is no shortage of passport booklets in the country and he advised applicants to begin the processing of their passports at least six months before their scheduled time of travel. In addition, he urged passport applicants to ensure their names and other information tally with their details on the National Identity Number database.

“If you need a passport now, start the process very early, do not begin the processing efforts two weeks to your travelling. If you don’t, already you have created problems for yourself because the system, after capturing, which is enrolment of your data, we harmonise it with the National Identity Management Commission database.

“Every identity document must be the same to ease capturing. You must understand that it is a presidential order that the new passport regime should be such that all data, everything about you as an individual must be the same and harmonised.

“What you have in the passport, which is the most secure identity document, must be the same with every other aspects of you, whether in the bank or at the national identity data base. When you come to us to register, after filling your form online, you come for data capturing and what you do there is to harmonise what you have filed in your form and your bio-data as we advance.

“So when your name doesn’t tally with what we have, your data information is not the same on the relevant platforms, we will have some challenges with passport processing,” Mr Aregbesola added.