The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has announced that the federal government has extended the commencement of the new passport regime earlier scheduled for June 1, 2021 to June 8, 2021.

This, it explained was to clear the backlog of applicants turning up to collect their passports across various issuing centres, a situation that is now creating congestion.

The explanation was contained in a statement issued by the Public Relations Officer, Amos Okpu, on behalf of the Comptroller-General of NIS, Muhammad Babandede.

Babandede noted that NIS had made significant progress in clearing the backlog of passport applications with a total of 230,500 applications cleared and passports produced.

“In furtherance to the Ministerial directives to clear all backlog of passport applications across issuing centres, the Comptroller General of Immigration Service, Muhammad Babandede MFR, wishes to inform the public, especially Passport applicants that the Service had made significant progress in the clearance exercise of the backlog of Passport applications.

“So far, a total number of 230,500 applications have been cleared and the Passports produced. Out of the number, a total of 43,350 are yet to be collected.

“Passport Control Officers have been directed to continue to send out short message notifications for collection to all applicants who indicated functional contact detail numbers in their applications while efforts have been intensified to clear up the remaining applications in some centres,” he said.

The NIS boss further directed that details of all Passports that were yet to be collected be uploaded on the service website, www.immigration.gov.ng for the attention of the public, adding that the service was also deploying other media means to notify the public.