The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has issued about three million electronic passports to Nigerians between 2007, when the new passport was introduced, and February 2011.

Comptroller-General of NIS, Mrs Rose Uzoma, made the disclosure yesterday in Abuja while speaking with our correspondent.

“I know we have issued a little less than three million electronic passports from 2007 to date. As we speak we are also giving permits to foreigners.

“Recently we have started registration of Africans and ECOWAS nationals. We didn’t have their data, but they are also foreigners.

“ We had to borrow the equipment from INEC that they used in the previous voter registration; re-programmed them and we gave them to all our local government area officers for them to take biometric data of all those Africans in our midst.

“At the last count we had about 400,000 non-Africans residing legally in Nigeria.’’

The NIS Comptroller-General said that one of the major challenges confronting the service was the attitude of some Nigerians as regards the processing of the passports.

She said that the challenge derived from the fact that most Nigerians didn’t like to fill forms either for their passports, or for other necessary documents.

“Many prefer to use middlemen to do something as simple as filling a form and in a lot of cases the middlemen fill the forms incorrectly, missing out some details.

Uzoma added that Nigerians also didn’t like to take responsibility for processing their travel documents and preferred to use middlemen, which often times, led to the problem of visa refusals at embassies.

She advised that Nigerians should be sensitised to understand that they had to conform with international best practices, especially when they planned to travel to other parts of the world.

Uzoma also said that the NIS had acquired the best technology to detect falsified age declaration and some other details, including the change of names when a dishonest applicant applied for a passport while claiming that he or she never took one in the past.

She said that when the immigration service took fingerprints in its machines, the computer would bring out the name of the original owner of those fingerprints and when they matched those of the applicant, such person would be revealed as having once obtained a passport.

The Comptroller-General also disclosed that the service apprehended 67 immigrants who registered as potential voters at the just-concluded voters registration and handed them over to the police.

“About 67 on the whole were arrested and handed over to the police. We have this ECOWAS protocol on free movement of persons which allows member state citizens to enter our country, get visa at the port of entry and leave amongst us provided they have their valid documents.

“Those member citizens, when once they have followed due process, they enjoy equal rights with Nigerians and if they choose to go against the law, they should be looked at just as we look at fellow citizens.

“Those who manage to register and who the watchful immigration officers arrested, we handed over to the police just like any Nigerian who did something against the INEC laws were also handed over to the police,’’ she said.

Uzoma assured that immigration officers would continue to work assiduously to ensure that the country’s borders remained impregnable by illegal immigrants.

She explained that officers posted to the various borders had been trained to effectively discharge their duties.

She said that it wouldn’t help to say that all immigration officers had done excellently well, but it was noteworthy that they had stopped many would-be illegal immigrants and this would continue to be the case.

“The officers are posted at the borders to be stopping people who want to come in through irregular routes and processing the documents of those who want to come in through the manned post,’’ she said.

Uzoma commended the Nigeria Customs Service for stopping the shipment of arms through the borders, particularly on Oct. 23, 2010 when its officers impounded a cache of arms of ammunition that was routed through the Apapa port in Lagos.

She said that, together, all security agencies at the border posts had been cooperating to ensure that Nigeria was not vulnerable to people who would constitute a nuisance or become national security risks.