The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has updated Nigerians on the total number of passports cleared as of 27 September 2023.
Information from the Service reveals that 190,749 passports have been cleared.
The development follows a call by the Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, on September 7, for the NIS to clear all backlog of passports.
The minister said the attempt was part of his pledges to clear the bottlenecks acquisition in the country.
In a fresh update, information from the Minister’s office in Abuja, the NIS now has about 13,583 pending applications before it.
According to the NIS, this number of applications, however, does not include those filed by Nigerians within the past four weeks, as the immigration offices nationwide continued to attend to requests for renewals of expired passports and those applying for fresh booklets every day.
According to The Nation, the minister has, however, vowed to keep a close watch on the operations of the NIS to prevent a recurrence of backlogs of applications due to deliberate human activities.
He said he was committed to doing away with human interactions in the processes to wash out corruption and promised the deployment of technology to hasten the processes of procurement of the booklets.