How applicants undergo hell to obtain Nigeria’s official document
By Cosmas Omegoh
Obtaining the Nigerian passport at the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Ikoyi, Lagos, can be as difficult as water flowing uphill. Those who succeed in doing so at the office hardly hesitate to celebrate the feat.
In season and out of season, a typical day at Ikoyi is full of stress. On this fateful Wednesday afternoon for instance, the office was a beehive. The visitors were in the region of 3,000 people, among them men, women, youths and children.
Every inch of space available in the premises was taken up. Most of the visitors wore long, sad faces. They looked marooned, having been sitting at the same spot for long. Some pacified their kids with snacks supplied by an army of vendors who kept milling around. All the visitors were passport applicants.
At the entrance gate, you are confronted by a legion of touts asking you: “Oga, do you need a passport?” They keep pestering you as you make your way through their ring. They pledge to help you obtain a passport – of course not for nothing.
Daily Sun gathered that those agents work for some of the Immigration staff. They charge far higher fees in excess of the officially recommended amount for the standard passport.
On the NIS website, the popular, standard 32-page passport for every Under 17 and individuals who have attained 60 and above is N10, 750, while the passport for applicants aged between 18 and 59 costs N17,000. But going through an agent, one might pay as much as N32,000. The cost can even be higher, depending on the availability of passport booklets or the length of time it takes to get the passport.
The moment you strike a deal with any of the agents or the Immigration personnel themselves,
they will help you cut down on the time in getting the document and the trouble that goes with obtaining it.
Now, whether you go through an agent or choose to handle your passport matter yourself, you cannot all together avoid the troubles involved. First, you pay some money – the cost of the passport booklet and address verification in a designated bank. Then you download a number of forms and obtain a personal file and submit them. You are then given a date to come for the data capturing.
But if you are passing through an agent – a senior officer at that – you are sure to get the real process short-circuited.
First, the officer invites an agent to whom you hand the bargained sum. In minutes, he/she makes payment(s). Then he/she brings the downloaded forms all in a file and you diligently input your bio data. Then he/she takes them from office to office.
While the agent gets busy, you sit in one big waiting room housing rows of seats. On this occasion, there were tens of people sitting there. More people kept arriving and soon no space was left for them. The new arrivals had to stand.
The second phase is data capture. You are lucky if it happens the same day you arrived. Of course, that has to be if you have a senior officer helping your quest. When it is your turn, you fight your way through a terrace in a nearby bungalow; you are hamstrung at every inch by a maze of human traffic. You are lucky to push into this rectangular room housing two functional computers with which a market population was being attended to. It is another tug of war. It takes averagely 15 minutes before one individual can be attended to.
On this occasion, the sun was up. There was this building to the left, overlooking the one where the data capturing was taking place. It was filled to the brim with applicants. Then to the right, there was an improvised shed. Long rows of seats were provided for other sets of applicants. Some of them had been sitting down for as long as they alone could tell. They had resigned to fate, believing that one magical hour would soon come. To pass time, some made friends with other applicants and kept discussing their plight.
There was a family that kept lamenting their ordeal at procuring passports. The mother was telling how a mistake made in the spelling of her name landed her in trouble and how she passed through hell to rectify it. “I was devastated,” she said to a woman beside her. “I was told that the only place where I could get it rectified was at their Abuja office. That was how I started going up and down. It was a painful experience,” she recalled.
Every other applicant stood in the sun, which was beating down on them savagely. Their eyes were fixed on the section of the building through which the applicants went in for their data capture. From time to time, an Immigration officer emerged from the confusion, and with a battery-powered public address system, announced names of the lucky few to go in.
At some point, the scene became rowdy. Progressively, the applicants grew restive. Tempers flew sky high. The angry ones voiced out their concerns; they couldn’t understand why some people who they perceived arrived just a little while ago were being invited in. Then a senior officer trudged out and urged for calm. He explained that the office had only two computers working. He pleaded with the applicants to be patient. The vexed applicants had surged forward, furious, but were only restrained from breaking through by the protective iron bars. The officer’s words were not heeded, so he began to issue threats. But he was only taken seriously by a few.
When it was time for you to go in, it called for joy; you could see that when the applicants sprang on their feet. There was haste in their paces as they hobbled in.
Inside the data-capturing room, there were two benches accommodating no fewer than 15 people, all waiting for the exercise. The NIS staff themselves didn’t help matters; they kept weaving in and out of the room in their numbers, thereby adding to an already chaotic situation. The poor air conditioner in the room laboured unendingly, struggling to spew some humid air on the crowd. Yet everyone was sweating.
At this particular office in Ikoyi, once it gets to your turn, you are invited to the hot seat. Whether you are applying for a new passport or renewing an existing one, the process is the same. You place your fingers – one after the other – on the data-capturing machine. Thereafter you sign your signature on the machine’s magical surface to end the process. A nearby printer then prints your details; it is your evidence when you turn up to pick your passport. With that in hand, you go off dazed, but triumphantly, praising God for coming that far.
On the day you come to pick your passport, you are in for the same push. It is another walk through hell. On this day as usual, thousands had gathered in front of the bungalow behind the data-capturing building. It was a market population. Everyone was expectant.
From time to time, an officer holding a public address system in hand sauntered out to announce the names of applicants whose passports were ready.
When it is your turn, you tear through the crowd in the terrace and make for the passport-collection room. You submit you data-capture printout. Then you validate your data by once again placing your fingers on the machine staring at you. Then an officer activates your passport and you go off out triumphantly holding a brand new Nigerian passport acquired after a well-fought fight.
Worried by the degree of stress Nigerians go through to get their passports, the reporter called the NIS office, Abuja, using the cell phone number 08119753844 which appears on its website.
The male voice, whose owner failed to identify himself, came through: “It is logical that because of the large number of applicants besieging the Ikoyi Passport office, and because the data-capturing machines there were not many, there would be delay in attending to applicants. The service is aware of this development; we are working hard to increase the number of machines there so as to alleviate the suffering of applicants.”
He put the cost of a 32-page standard passport at N17,000 and said the amount excluded bank charges and warned applicants to desist from patronising touts. “We are aware of the existence of touts in the system. The service is striving to eliminate the middlemen because their presence adds to the cost of obtaining passports.”
He regretted that some Immigration officers were part of the racket and advised passport applicants to help the NIS eliminate their presence by going through official channels. 
“It is a Nigerian thing,” he said. “Part of the challenge we are having is that many Nigerians don’t want to subject themselves to process. They have this penchant that one must know someone in the NIS before they could be attended to. We are aware of this.”
He allayed fears that applicants have to spend a long time to obtain their passports, stating that the maximum time was three days. “You don’t have to spend an age to get your passport out. Over the weeks, the service has tried to clear the backlog of passport challenges across the country, particularly at the Ikoyi office. If you make clear application, the maximum time for you to pick up your passport out is 72 hours.”
He explained that the process of passport renewal was different, saying: “You don’t need to go through the same process of applying for a new passport. All you need to do is to write a formal letter attaching your expired passport and take it to the Desk Officer in any of our offices.”
But not a few Nigerians that have experienced the agony of obtaining the Nigerian passport would let out a couple of sad, sceptic sniggers at the confidence of the NIS officer. And their cynicism would be justified. His positive narrative is a world away from the reality at the Ikoyi Passport Office, many Nigerians would definitely insist.