Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, Minister of Interior, has raised concerns about the widespread possession of Nigerian passports by foreigners, which he says has caused global embarrassment and led to the wrongful attribution of crimes to Nigerian citizens.
Speaking on Arise Television’s Morning Show on Wednesday, December 18, the minister emphasized the need for pre-data documentation to ensure the integrity of Nigeria’s passports, asserting that they cannot currently be fully relied upon.
“Passport is beyond a travel document; it’s a sovereign document of state. It belongs to the Nigerian government,” Tunji-Ojo said. He explained that stricter measures are being introduced to verify the nationality of applicants.
“For us to be sure that you are a Nigerian, upload your certificate of origin, out of which we have people we have across the 774 local web called the DVOs — Document Verification Officers. These people will go and authenticate those documents.
“Immediately you upload, it gets sent real-time to the local government where this thing is from. They authenticate it to be sure that you are a Nigerian and is getting a Nigerian passport.”
The minister decried the damage caused by foreigners carrying Nigerian passports and blamed them for many of the crimes attributed to Nigerians abroad.
“The embarrassment that we get as a country by people who are not Nigerians carrying Nigerian passports is out of this world,” he said.
“Most of the crimes that they say Nigerians are committing abroad, I say this clearly, a lot of them are not Nigerians. They are carrying Nigerian passports. If you do not have a certificate of origin, how am I supposed to be sure that you are a Nigerian? What is the evidence, what is the evidential facts to attest to the fact that you are a Nigerian?”
Tunji-Ojo highlighted the need to simplify passport issuance for citizens while maintaining national security and the integrity of the process. He noted that inheriting data for renewals will eliminate the need for repeated verifications, with citizens required to upload pre-data documents only once.
“So for me, I want to make passport easier, but not at the expense of national security; not at the expense of the integrity of the country,” he added. “And I think these are desperate actions that we must take to sanitize the system.”
