The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) said it has cleared 190,749 passports as of 27 September 2023.
The development follows a call by the Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, on September 7, for the NIS to clear all backlog of passports.
The minister said the attempt was part of his pledges to clear the bottleneck acquisition in the country.
The NIS update revealed that there were about 13,583 pending applications before it.
This number of applications, however, does not include those filed by Nigerians within the past four weeks, as the immigration offices nationwide continued to attend to requests for renewals of expired passports and those applying for fresh booklets every day.
Nonetheless, the minister of interior vowed to keep a close watch on the operations of the NIS to prevent a recurrence of backlogs of applications due to deliberate human activities.
He said he was committed to doing away with human interactions in the processes to wash out corruption and promised the deployment of technology to hasten the processes of procurement of the booklets.
