On Friday, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the Minister of Interior, said a ‘contactless’ process to renewing the Nigerian passport within and outside the country would commence in April 2025.
Tunji-Ojo made the pronouncement while addressing newsmen in Abuja.
“The only reason you go (to the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) office) is because of your biometric capture. The world has gone so digital now that you don’t need to physically go and capture,” Tunji-Ojo said.
“In fact, what you do virtually, the resolution can even be better than the one you go to do physically.
“The process will go live on April 1, but before then, there will be a lot of testing.”
The minister said the service would be unavailable for first-time applicants.
The “contactless process” involves downloading an NIS application from either the Google Play Store or Apple App Store, creating a user profile, entering NIN information, details of the expired passport, taking a picture and entering fingerprints.
The information entered must, however, match that on the NIS data page. Once the fingerprint is verified, the user will be prompted to make a payment. Enrollment is 100% completed after successful payment.
The minister said the process would go live on April 1, 2025.
This is, however, not the first time he would be making such pronouncements.
NOVEMBER 28, 2023
On November 28, 2023, Tunji-Ojo said the automated application would become operational in December 2023.
“We gave a date — December 2023. We are 99% done. In fact, we have done the testing and we should be going live in the next one week or thereabouts,” Tunji-Ojo said.
“This will ensure that Nigerians, all they need to do at an immigration centre, is just fingerprint biometrics.
“Everything regarding pre-biometrics will be done in the comfort of your homes, including uploading passport photographs and supporting documents.
“They will have gone live about two weeks ago but I saw some errors when they came to do the presentation and I said no. We were talking about balancing national security and convenience.”
The reason as to why the exercise did not commence as promised by the minister was never made public.
JANUARY, 2024
At the beginning of 2024, Tunji-Ojo again said the automation of the passport application process would begin on January 8.
“We are good to go live,” Tunji-Ojo said on January 1.
“We are starting the training and on January 8, the solution will be live and direct for Nigerians to have a good feel, a sweet experience based on the Renewed Hope of Mr President.
“We have been able to reduce human contact in passport acquisition to the minimum.”
Again, the process never took off as promised.
MARCH, 2024
On February 18, Tunji-Ojo, for a third time, declared that the fully automated passport application system would go live on March 8.
“We were supposed to go live earlier than this time but we analysed that the major concern with Nigerians in the diaspora was obviously the contactless (application) which will finally eradicate movement from one place to another in the process of passport acquisition,” Tunji-Ojo stated at the time.
Yet again, the automated passport application system did not go live on the March 8 date the minister promised.
