The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has unveiled its first centralised passport personalisation centre with a capacity to produce up to 5,000 passports daily.
Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, inspected the building at the NIS headquarters in Abuja on Thursday alongside Kemi Nandap, the service’s comptroller general.
Previously, Nigeria produced its passports at multiple centres across the world.
But with the “strategic infrastructural investment, which did not cost a kobo to the government, the NIS can now personalise over 1,000 passports in one hour,” Tunji-Ojo said in a post about the new high-speed machines at the facility.
“To put it into perspective, long before this development, the service could only record an average of 250–300 passports daily,” the minister said.
“But, today, under 5 work hours, the service can now deliver about 4500 to 5000 passports.”
He said the facility would enable the NIS to deliver passports faster to applicants and “drastically cut down on waiting time in our bid to put an end to needless delays that once riddled the passport acquisition process”.
Tunji-Ojo hailed President Bola Tinubu’s administration for living up to its promise of “transparency and accountability”.
Last month, the NIS announced a hike in prices for a Nigerian passport.
A 32-page passport with five-year validity costs N100,000, and a 64-page passport with 10-year validity is now N200,000.
The price adjustments came barely a year after a similar announcement.
