The endless e-passport stress

Also published in Daily Trust 

Though this piece may hardly if at all interest my home based compatriots especially who have never had to stay outside Nigeria for an extended period of time, because for obvious reasons they may not appreciate the significance and indeed the value of having a valid passport the way their foreign based compatriots do. After all, an expatriate’s valid passport remains the most indispensible official document he needs all the time regardless of the endeavour he pursues aboard especially in efficiently functioning countries.

I therefore intend to highlight the seemingly endless dilemma to which many foreign based Nigerians are unnecessarily subjected, by The Nigeria Immigration Service due to its inability to provide the electronic passport issuing facilities in most of Nigeria’s diplomatic missions around the world.

Since it is “no longer possible” to obtain a passport through a proxy as it used to be in the past before the introduction of the e-passport, and in view of the scarcity of the e-passport issuing facilities, The Nigeria Immigration Service arranges teams of passport officers, who go around the world to collect the biometric data of foreign based Nigerian applicants, go back to Nigeria with the collected data to issue them passports and send them back to the applicants through Nigeria’s various diplomatic missions, in what was supposed to be a temporary arrangement pending the completion of the process of equipping the country’s embassies and consulates with the e-passport issuing facilities. By the way towards the end of this piece I will explain why I put the phrase “no longer possible” in inverted commas.

Anyway, apparently due to some vested interests of some individuals who benefit from such arranged tours where public resources are unnecessarily wasted, the immigration authorities are not likely provide such much needed facilities anytime soon. Nevertheless, due to schedule inconsistency of the passport officers’ visit to a particular country, unsatisfactory service delivery and sometimes lack of proper coordination with Nigerian communities through concerned Nigerian embassies and consulates, many foreign based Nigerians can’t access the service to get the passport when they need it, hence they still have to incur the stress of having to hurriedly embark on an unplanned trip back to Nigeria in order to obtain it and go back to their various bases. As a matter of fact, even in some countries where the e-passport issuing facilities are available in Nigerian embassies and/or consulates, many Nigerian applicants out there still suffer frustration due to the scarcity of passport booklets and/or breakdown of the issuing facilities etc. 

Besides, even if one manages to obtain it, he still has to go through similar stress once it expires because it is not designed to be renewed; instead a fresh one has to be issued. Incidentally, only a couple of months ago I came to know this, as I also came to know that a team of passport officers from Nigeria would visit the United Arab Emirates, where I reside.

Yet, I was already arranging a trip back to Nigeria to renew my wife’s expired e-passport when I, among some other Nigerians, happened to meet with Nigerian ambassador in the UAE, Mr Ibrahim Auwal, who confirmed the impending arrival of the passport officers from Nigeria. He also introduced me to a senior embassy staff who was apparently coordinating the passport officers’ visit, and who collected my phone number and promised to contact me upon their arrival, which he however never did. Instead I came to know of their arrival through a locally recruited staff at the embassy and later from the ambassador himself. Incidentally, I already had a bad experience back in 2011 when I had to get a passport for my newborn baby only to discover that the passport officers had just come and left, hence I had to travel all the way back to Nigeria to get it.

In any case, when I learnt that the team would work on Friday even though it was a public holiday here, I, accompanied by my wife and child, drove all the way from our base in Sharjah to Nigerian embassy in Abu Dhabi, and predictably, the passport officers showed up at the embassy behind schedule and after some further delay, partly due to the lack of operational efficiency and partly due to the disorderly attitude of some Nigerian passport applicants, the exercise began and soon we were luckily done and drove back home to wait for the arrival of the booklet from Abuja, which is likely to take long, perhaps more than necessary.

Anyway back to the reason why I downplay the impossibility of tampering with a Nigerian e-passport. It is important to note that, though it may be hard if not impossible for an outsider to do it, it is actually been done by some unscrupulous elements among the passport officers themselves. For instance I understand that there is a Dubai based Nigerian criminal who reportedly collaborates with some passport officers in Lagos to commit this crime. 

The Dubai based crook acts on behalf of his clients who have either overstayed their visas and want leave the country without facing a penalty and/or re-entry ban, or those who have committed a crime hence are desperate to flee the country with a forged travel document. He therefore sources for and buys genuine and valid Nigerian passports from some Nigerians who intend to overstay their visas in the UAE. After buying a passport this way, they send it to their Nigerian based accomplices i.e. such passport officers who somehow access the passport database and tamper with some vital information and replace the picture on the passport with that of the client. They then send it back to their Dubai based accomplice who in turn hands it over to the client to enable him escape from the country.

While I urge The Nigeria Immigration Service to provide enough quantity of e-passport issuing facilities in Nigerian missions aboard, I employ it to probe the activities of such corrupt elements among their staff, whose activities in any case prove that honest human elements are absolutely indispensible in any situation no matter how technologically driven, hence it brings us back to the need for attitudinal reform and professional discipline.