Home delivery of passports will start in June – Tunji-Ojo

Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, Minister of Interior, says home delivery of passports will start in June.

Tunji-Ojo made the disclosure on Friday during the inspection of electronic gates at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport’s new terminal in Abuja.

The minister said the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) would start home delivery in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kano, and Abuja.

Tunji-Ojo said for those in the diaspora, the service would begin in the United States and the United Kingdom, with testing to ensure its effectiveness.

He said the delivery will not include every location to avoid overloading and damaging the system.

According to him, lack of data centres delayed the home delivery of passports.

He said NIS had been using a private company’s data centre but needed to establish a permanent solution to address the issue.

We have completed the whole solution but when we came on board, we realised that the data centre was not really there,” Tunji-Ojo said.

“We were leveraging on a private company data centre and we appreciate them for that assistance. We think that it is better to create a permanent solution to problems rather than quick fixes.

“We could have done it in February but we had to build our data centre from scratch to be able to keep the integrity of our data and national security intact. This is more important.

“It is disgraceful that NIS is 61 years old and NIS is a custodian of biometric data of Nigeria and we believe that NIS should be in charge of the data of Nigeria.