A total of 7,500 travel passports are awaiting collection at the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) offices in Oyo State.
Assistant Comptroller-General of Immigration in charge of Planning and Statistics at the NIS Headquarters, ACG Dora Amahian, made this known when she visited the NIS office in Ibadan on Wednesday.
“We have about 7,500 uncollected passports in Oyo State and we do not want them to expire in our hands because if they do, applicants will have to pay money for fresh applications,’’ she said.
Amahian noted that some of the passports had been ready but were not collected in the last one to two years.
She said that the NIS had been sending text messages to the applicants and that only few of them had been responding to such calls.
She lamented that some applicants submitted wrong phone numbers making SMS sent to them to remain undelivered.
“In times past, there had been unpalatable comments about how applicants were made to wait endlessly for passport issuance.
“We want to tell you that NIS has been issuing passports but people don’t come to pick them up,’’ she said.
She appealed to those who had applied for passports in the last six months to nine months in Oyo State to pick up their passports.
Amahian assured Nigerians that passports would be issued to fresh applicants within six weeks, while renewals would be done in three weeks.