Pascal Arogorn Ibe
The Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) has released a list of names of persons yet to claim their passports across 29 collection centres in the country.
The NIS disclosed, in a statement, that it is in possession of 43,350 unclaimed passports as of June 1.
Lagos accounts for the highest with 14,406 uncollected passports across its collection centres in Ikeja, Ikoyi and FESTAC.
In Kaduna, 105 are uncollected, while the federal capital territory (FCT) has 461 passports that have not been claimed.
The NIS asked its centres to notify applicants of their ready passports, and urged Nigerians to come forward for collection.
“In furtherance to the ministerial directives to clear up on the backlog of passport applications across issuing centres, the controller general of immigration service, Mohammed Babandede, wishes to inform the public especially passport applicants that the service has made significant progress in the clearance exercise of backlog,” Amos Okpu, NIS spokesman, said in the statement on Monday.
“So far a total number of 230,500 applications have been cleared and the passports produced. Out of this, is a total number of 43,350 are yet to be collected.
“Passport control officers have been directed to continue to send short message notifications for collection to all applicants who indicated functional contact details or numbers in their applications, while efforts have been intensified to clear up the remaining applications and some centres.”
The NIS had, on May 18, suspended new requests for passports until June 8 to enable passport issuing centres to clear the existing backlog of applications.
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