- Photo caption : Interior Minister, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo
The Interior Minister, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo has described as ‘stupid’ practice by officials of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) directing people, especially married women, to its headquarters in Abuja to change their names on their passports.
He spoke at a dinner with members of the Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu (ABAT) Media Centre and some social media influencers in Abuja.
Tunji-Ojo said there is nowhere in the world where women are subjected to such inhuman practice on account of marriage.
He wondered if NIS personnel in Abuja were special compared to those in the various passport offices across the federation.
“There is one stupid thing I have seen and it is that a woman gets married, changes her name and then she has to come to Abuja all the way from, say Kaura Namoda or Enugu, just to effect a change of name in her passport. It is absurd.
“I can’t just figure it out that you just want to change just your name and you have to be in Abuja. I have asked the Immigration people: is it that Immigration people in Abuja have more than one head than those in the states?” he queried.
Passport issuance, he said, is the least of his worries, adding that there are other issues such as the need to have secure borders for the country.
Tunji-Ojo disclosed that effective from March, the new passport reforms he is putting in place would ensure contactless biometrics enrolment to allow Nigerians do their enrolments from their comfort zones.
According to him, “With the new reforms, you don’t need to travel to Abuja to change your data. Everything will be done online. From March, once you have enrolled for a passport and you are coming to renew, please, don’t come to my office; stay in your house and do it. We have contactless biometrics, and this can be done in five minutes. We don’t need to keep taking your biometrics every five years. Who does that in the world? This is what #RenewedHope is about. It is about positively disrupting the process. By the grace of God, the issue of passports is the least of our worries.”
Tunji-Ojo, who tasked NIS on the need for knowledge transfer and training of officers on passport issues, appealing to Nigerians to keep faith with the Tinubu administration, as he leading the country rightly
In his words, “Any day I think I don’t have the zeal again, I will do what honest men do and go because Nigeria as a country does not deserve 99.9 per cent. It deserves 100 per cent from us. That is what public service demands,”
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