The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) says about 97,000 passports are yet to be collected by their owners across the country.
The Service Public Relations Officer, (SPRO) Comptroller of Immigration, Tony Akuneme said this in an interview with newsmen on Friday.
According to Akuneme, Lagos State had half of the uncollected passports.
He said that there was also a danger that half of the owners of the uncollected passports could not be reached due to lack of proper documentation because of a third party involvement.
He also said that the essence of state of emergency declaration was to draw attention of the media so they could deepened the process for the service as alot of people do not know if their passport were ready for collection.
“Some of them engaged agents to help them in their passport processing and these agents might be doing for alot of persons.
“They end up dropping wrong contacts and thereby making it difficult to reach out to the owners of these passports when they are ready for collection. This is a big challenge, “he said.
This is coming after the Acting Comptroller General, NIS, Mrs Caroline Adepoju had recently declared state of emergency on passport issues across the country.
