TheCable

The Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) says not less than 140,000 international passports are uncollected nationwide.

Tony Akuneme, the NIS spokesperson, shared the development in an interview with the NAN on Tuesday in Lagos.

Akuneme said about 40,000 of the total 140,000 are in the Alausa passport office in Ikeja.

He said the majority of the uncollected passports had wrong phone contacts and untraceable addresses.

Akuneme called on applicants to process their international passports themselves using the correct details and without involving racketeers.

“In spite of the extensive awareness embarked on by NIS on passport application and its processes, some Nigerians still patronise racketeers or consultants to process their passports, which usually does not work out well,” he said.

“Some applicants are gullible, they fell into the hands of touts who duped them of their hard-earned money.”

He urged Nigerians to visit https://passport.immigration.gov.ng/application to personally process their passports.

“I still want to emphatically plead with passport seekers not to use consultants, racketeers, nor masqueraders while processing their international passports,” he said.

“Most of the contact numbers inputted by these unethical human beings are not real.”

Akuneme called on applicants who had applied for passports before July 2022 and were unable to obtain their passports to visit the NIS website to lodge their complaints.