Nigeria’s Consul-General Seeks Deadline Extension For New Passport

Nigeria’s Consul-General in New York, Mr. Ibrahim Auwalu has called for the extention of the deadline on the renewal of the new Nigerian passport as the Machine Readable Passport (MRP) ceases to be a valid travel document with effect from December 31, 2010.
The Nigeria Immigration Service had announced that from January 1, 2011, only holders of the e-passport would be allowed to travel out of Nigeria.
Auwalu said on Saturday in New York that with less than an eight months to the deadline, the Nigeria Mission in New York had only issued 14,848 e-passports, between June 2008 and March 2010.
According to the Consul-General, with an estimated one million Nigerians living in the US, New York is the only centre equipped with the standard acquisition and enrolment machines for the issuance of the new Nigerian passports.
The Consul-General said the mission and immigration staffers in New York were over-stretched, handling thousands of applicants for e-passports.
He said the New York mission was the only Nigerian post issuing the e-passports in the entire western hemisphere, including North America, South America and the Caribbean Islands.
“My recommendation is that the MRP should be allowed to die naturally. Until now, some Nigerian posts and missions outside are still issuing the MRP. In the MRP, it is said that the passport is valued for five years and at the end of this year, you tell me that my passport is no longer valid and I do not know how that will not generate confusion and chaos”, he said.
“The sheer number of applicants we have for e-passport is stretching our resources. People walk in from all over the US, and sometimes from Canada, people fly in for this passport”, Auwalu further stated.
“Every weekend from now till the end of June has been taken up and we have invitations to travel outside New York because we came up with the idea to take the services to the people”, he further explained.
It was learnt that anger, frustration and chaos, are the order of the day at the immigration department in the Nigeria mission in New York as Nigerians struggle each working day to exchange their old passport for the new one.
Inadequate staffers, poor logistics and limited office accommodation are some of the complaints of both applicants and workers.
It would be recalled that in 2007, the NIS introduced the chip-based e-passport to check the growing cases of forgery and identity theft.
At the onset, 22 centres across the country were designated for the issuance of the e-passport but at present, all the 36 states and the FCT have their centres.
In 2008, Nigeria missions in London, New York Johannesburg, New Delhi and Madrid and the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) started rolling out e-passports.
The NIS says it has also carried out e-passport intervention programmes in Poland, Greece, Ukraine, Austria, Malawi, Botswana, Ethiopia, Cameroun, Togo, Namibia as well as Zambia, and is set to intervene in Ireland and Australia soon.
In January this year, the NIS said it has issued 1.7 million e-passports between August 2007 and December 2009.