Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has disclosed that the country saved about N600m by automating its passport application system.
He made this known when he was featured on Episode 2 of ‘Unfiltered: The Big Interview,’ a YouTube interview series hosted by O’tega ‘The Tiger’ Ogra.
He said, “When we came on board in August last year, it was about stock-taking because I always say this, as a professional, you spend more time planning so that execution can be pretty easy and we’ve been able to do that across all our agencies and today, the short-term goals that we had for ourselves we’ve been able to achieve that.
“For example, in Immigration, the short-term goals include clearing our backlog of over 204,000 passports that we inherited, we cleared that in slightly over two weeks, less than three weeks we’re able to do that and under President Bola Tinubu, we made sure that passport backlog has become something of the past that will never happen again.”
Continuing, Tunji-Ojo said: “We went through our automation process which is basically broken into three different stages but in terms of our short-term target, it’s achieving the first two then the midterm target is, of course, the third one which is where we are now.
“We’ve achieved the first one, which is, of course, automating the application process that has started saving government billions of naira because I’ll give you an example. We used to pay for archiving of documents, but today, we have automated that process that applicants now upload by themselves.
“When you calculate that, for archiving alone which is about N200 that we used to pay per applicant and by about three million passports a year, that’s about N600 million. So, we have saved government of that money and yet it’s even more convenient for people because people can now do that on their own and we moved now to the stage of even uploading passport and all these other things.”
He added that the ministry is “about to go live in the next couple of days” with a home delivery system for passports.
The minister further highlighted the implementation of the Advanced Passenger Information and Passenger Name Record (API/PNR) system, which allows immigration officials to pre-profile travellers before they arrive in Nigeria.
“When you come into Nigeria, our scrutiny is now objective,” he added.
