From: Romanus Ugwu, Abuja

The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has dismissed speculations that it is facing serious shortage of passport booklets, revealing that it recently distributed over 100,000 booklets to its various passport offices across the country.

In a statement signed by the Service Public Relations Officer S. James (ACI), the Service warned Nigerians against patronizing touts, reiterating that passport booklets are not in short demand.

“NIS has no problem of shortage nor lack of booklets. Last week alone, 100,000 booklet were shared to passport office nationwide. The good people of Nigeria are advised to locate any passport office to them for acquisition and avoid patronizing touts,” NIS noted.

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While warning against patronizing touts, the Image maker, said: “Nigerians are frequent travellers, high net worth business men and women, and professionals with business links and professional assignments all over the world. The frequency of such travels necessitate quick exhaustion of the 32-page Passport, hence the wisdom of the NIS leadership to produce a 64-page  Passport which takes care of frequent travellers and captures every other person that will need extra pages of Passport for ease of travel.

“Touts hanging around Passport offices do more harm than good to the aspirations and desires of Nigerians  in their efforts to get Passports by intercepting prospective applicants outside the Passport office areas or pretending to be a staff. Nigerians are advised to keep to the rule by dealing with no other person apart from those designated officers/men on schedule duty at our Passport offices.

“The Comptroller-General of NIS has directed Passport officers in charge to clear the office area of unwanted elements such as touts who make Nigerians go through difficulties in obtaining Passports which are actually much available.

“Let us sanitize the system together by reporting suspected cases to the Passport officers in charge  and also take advantage of the Immigration Service’s official online and social media platforms to make legitimate inquiries and reports,” he noted.