I am deeply honoured to have been invited to address you at this year’s Comptroller General of Immigration Annual Conference holding in the ancient city of Benin. As a former Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms and now a development practitioner and public intellectual, I have been very supportive of the reforms undertaken under the current Comptroller General of Immigration.
As a frequent traveller, I have noticed that over the last 2 years or so, Immigration Officers are no longer unnecessarily over-friendly. The excessive greeting has stopped, and they no longer ask what you brought back for them when you arrive from out of the country into Lagos or Abuja. Indeed, there are signs at the Lagos Airport providing a phone number for people to report any corruption seen and the Immigration Officers at the beautiful new Abuja Airport now smile and tell you “Welcome back home, Sir” before they stamp you in. Unfortunately, many Nigerians do not easily distinguish between Immigration, Customs, DSS, Quarantine, NDLEA and FAAN personnel and are likely to describe all of them as “Immigration” when they complain. Those that have not travelled since the new changes came into place, particularly Nigerians in diaspora, will still argue forcefully that the practice still goes on. I will return to this issue of the image of the Immigration Service later in this lecture.
The Visa on Arrival scheme is another laudable initiative that has enhanced the ease of doing business, facilitating much-needed foreign investment into the country. My personal experience as the Country Director of an international development company has been very positive in this regard. The biometric visa scheme being rolled out across Nigerian missions abroad is also another initiative worthy of commendation. I have been similarly impressed that Nigerians are now able to contact the Immigration Service through social media and I am pleased to say that the Service has one of the most responsive social media handles in the entire public service. I must pause to recognise the efforts of officers like ACI Amos Okpu and his team and was pleased to have written a letter of commendation to the CGI on the sterling efforts of ACI Okpu in May 2019. In an environment where every public officer is seen as an empty-headed thief, ACI Okpu and his team have distinguished themselves as approachable, polite, professional, helpful and responsive. This is worthy of emulation, not just by others in the Immigration Service, but also by the Nigerian public service in general.
I have also been impressed with the efforts to harmonise identity management by linking the Nigerian passport with the National Identity Number and providing a space in the Immigration Headquarters for the Nigeria Identity Management Commission to aid data integration. Issues remain with the availability of the NIMC database for purposes of harmonisation and the NIMC enrolment system across the country remains difficult, but I am aware that discussions are going on between the Immigration Service and NIMC in this regard. The new polycarbonate passports with up to 10 years validity is also very commendable and I have been made aware of plans to put in place a Passports Plaza at Immigration headquarters.
This does not mean that there are no issues. As Director General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, I conducted an informal opinion poll in 2017 asking the public what they were most dissatisfied with when they come into contact with government to obtain official documentation. Top of the list was Passports, followed by Drivers Licences, National Identity Cards and Tax Clearance Certificates. We were able to clear the 6-month backlog with drivers’ licences at the time, encourage NIMC to move from a focus on producing National Identity Cards to emphasising National Identity Numbers, and to welcome the introduction of the electronic tax clearance certificates by the Federal Inland Revenue Service.
We saw some improvements in passport issuance, particularly in foreign missions but not much changed in Nigeria, particularly in Lagos. Complaints about the scarcity of booklets continued, as did claims of Immigration Officers running extortion rackets. Lagos, probably due to its population, had the most complaints while smaller cities like Dutse and Ilorin had fewer complaints. As you know, Lagos controls the media. Whatever is the perception about a service in Lagos is generally taken to be the situation in Nigeria. Lagos, therefore, requires special attention. Interestinly, Kano which also has a large population reported fewer problems.
As much as I have been supportive of the efforts of the Nigerian Immigration Service, I have also been very critical. In May 2019, I wrote an article in BusinessDay newspaper titled ‘How To Get a Nigerian Passport Within One Week Without Paying a Bribe.’ Given the title, many Nigerians flocked to read the article, only to find that it was highly critical of the Immigration Service but suggested ways in which its Passport Service could be improved. The article went as far as suggesting that the Comptroller General was unwilling or unable to do anything to improve the Passport Service. Knowing the Nigerian public service as well as I do, I was actually expecting to experience one or two delays next time I passed through Immigration. I didn’t but I have to say that I was shocked to receive an invitation to speak at this event today.
Having said that, the reaction of my friend, Dr Jumoke Oduwole, Special Adviser to the President on Ease of Doing Business, whose efforts I also criticised with regards to the management of passports, to the article was: “Doc, we hear you loud and clear. We will redouble our efforts. I can assure you that the Comptroller General of Immigration, Mr Mohammed Babandede, is one of the most reform-minded public servants in Nigeria today.” The fact that I have been invited to speak at this event and the warm welcome that I received from the CGI since my arrival in Benin is proof that Dr Oduwole was right about the CGI. As we get into the topic of today’s lecture on improving the process of passport application, payment and issuance, let me quickly say that I will not be upset if the last round of applause you have just offered is the last one I receive until the end of this lecture.
I believe that the issues are clear and are known to most of us here today. Yesterday, I announced on Twitter that I would have the honour of addressing the CGI and his officers and men this morning, and asked Nigerians what they would like me to tell them. Many said I should just tell them what they already know and suggest ways in which they could tackle them. That is precisely what I intend to do in this lecture. The truth of the matter is that when a Nigerian needs a passport, the first thing they do is to ask around whether you know anyone in Immigration. This should not be the case. Public services are meant to be impersonal and predictable. The best example I often give about how the public service should work is with regards to posting a letter. When you want to post a letter, you simply put a stamp on an envelope, drop it in a post box and it is delivered. You don’t need to know anybody. You don’t need to beg anybody. You don’t need to bribe anybody. And you don’t need to “show appreciation” to anybody when your letter is delivered.
The passport application portal is not always available, and it seems to work better on some internet browsers than on others. When it does work, the payment portal is not always reliable. Citizens often have to try multiple times before being able to make payment. This forces citizens to seek contact with Immigration officers, opening the door for allegations of extortion and corruption. I am not also currently aware of any sort of tracking system to inform you about progress with your passport application or to let you know when your passport is ready for collection. The Federal Road Safety Commission has a portal on which you can check whether or not your licence is ready and you receive a text message when it is ready, with details of where to and pick it up from. If it Is possible with Drivers’ Licence applications, it is also possible with passport applications and it should not be difficult to do. To my mind, the biggest constraint to the smooth issuance of passports in Nigeria is human contact with Immigration officers. Once human contact is minimised, the allegations of corruption will fall away drastically.
The issue of non-availability of passport booklets, whether real or contrived, remains the greatest annoyance of Nigerians. There is really no reason why we should have passport shortages now. I am aware that the crash of the Naira and the recession in 2016 made it difficult to continue to pay foreign companies producing the passport booklets at the agreed price in dollars without increasing the cost charged to Nigerians for the booklets. Since then, costs have gone up and the President has directed that passports must now be produced in Nigeria, and given the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company the exclusive right to produce passports when the current contracts with foreign firms expire. If we can print our own money, there is no reason why we should not be able to print our passport booklets. I hope that the Federal Government makes available to resources to the Mint to procure the sophisticated equipment required by the Mint to be able to produce the passport booklets.
In 2007, Nigeria became the first African country to adopt the e-passport, which is recognised for its high level of security around the world. Many Nigerians think that the e-passport booklet is a mere piece of paper that any printer can print. They are not aware that the e-passport is actually a sophisticated piece of security hardware that has a chip embedded within specialised paper. Even the ink and the thread used to stich it together are not items that you will find in the open market. Without revealing unnecessary security information, I believe that the Service can do more to educate Nigerians of this fact. My experience of public service reforms over the last 35 years or so makes it clear to me that it is not enough to carry out reforms. You must also communicate the reforms you are undertaking. The image is as important as the substance and there is often a time lag between when reforms happen and when people actually believe that it is happening. Communication and engagement with the public is key.
Over the past few years, I have heard successive CGIs announce that there are enough passport booklets to go round. This has not been the experience of Nigerians on the street. It is possible that some Immigration Officers are sabotaging the efforts of the CGI and creating artificial scarcity in order to extract corrupt benefits from citizens. I suggest that the Service’s SERVICOM Unit actively encourages Nigerians to report cases where they have been told that there is a scarcity of booklets and that the CGI dedicates a monitoring team to track which passport offices those allegations are emanating from. The monitoring team should also include IT-savvy officers who can monitor the application and payment platforms for downtime or manipulation and report weekly to the CGI himself. Erring officers should be sanctioned as a deterrent to others. A statement by the CGI himself to this effect will go a long way to curb the menace.
Currently, Nigeria does not really have a process of passport renewal, as every passport application is treated as a new application. This means that each time you get a new passport, you need to present yourself again for biometric capture. This is a source of great annoyance for many people. Admittedly, the Drivers License is not as secure as the e-passport but you can renew your drivers’ licence from the comfort of your bedroom by selecting the option to bypass capture. If your biometrics are not in order, you will not be able to bypass capture and may indeed need to take your driving test all over again and go through the process properly. With the data integration with the National Identity Database managed by NIMC, the need to have your biometrics captured again should no longer be there.
If, for security reasons, it remains necessary to have your biometrics captured each time you renew your passport, the Service should put in place a workable appointment system. If you apply for a 5-year passport today, you are likely to get an appointment in 6 years’ time – after the passport you are applying for would have expired. This makes no sense and can be easily fixed. In other countries, you are given 30-minte slots to choose from saying when and where you would like to be captured. If you miss your slot, you would have to book again. If people know when and where to go for capture and are able to do it and leave within 30 minutes, without begging or bribing anyone, the complaints in this regard will dissipate.
I am not unaware that there are often equipment and network issues that mean that the capture process is not always available. As a private citizen now, I am unsympathetic to this, particularly when I am paying the equivalent of $200 for a 64-page 10-year passport and the government is preaching a One Government mantra as part of the Ease of Doing Business regime. Despite the Treasury Single Account, the Immigration Service should negotiate with the Ministry of Finance how to utilise the money citizens pay for passports to ensure a seamless service founded on reliable technology and internet access. The provision of services like passports cannot be subject to the vagaries of fund releases by the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation. I suggest that the Service makes a formal request to the Ministry of Finance in this regard, if it has not already done so, and that where the Ministry of Finance is unwilling or unable to accommodate its peculiar needs, the Service should bring the matter to the attention of Mr President.
There should be clear service standards for passport issuance. Nigerians should be told upfront exactly how long they can expect to wait to get a passport, without begging or bribing anyone. The Immigration Service should regularly publish statistics as to how it is performing against the standards set. When performance is good, the CGI should reward officers. The reward does not have to be monetary. It could be with access to training or official commendations and excellence awards by the CGI.
Related to this, most Nigerians know that you can get a passport within 24 hours if you part with enough money. This is evidence that it is possible to do. Nigerians are notorious for leaving things to the last moment and will only start applying for a passport a few days before they are due to travel. I suggest that the Service puts in place a fast-track service and charges a premium for people that want to use it. Many Nigerians would happily pay a premium to get their passports, officially, within a day or two. Rather than have the money for a premium service go into the pockets of corrupt officers, the money can go officially to the Service, particularly if it has been able to come to an arrangement with the Ministry of Finance on the operation of the Treasury Single Account. As a former public servant, I am acutely aware of the “what is in it for me” syndrome with regards to officers and how to make sure that they do not sabotage the system in order to continue to derive corrupt benefits. One way to tackle this would be to use part of the funds from the fast-track service to pay bonuses to officers. The bonus system should not be limited only to officers that work in the passport service but should form part of a wider incentive scheme that reduces the need to seek illegal funds.
In many passport offices, there are various people milling around who have no business being there. These touts hijack applicants before they even get to see the Immigration Officer. Because the Service does not do anything about this, people conclude, often rightly, that the touts are working on behalf of the Immigration Officers inside. Indeed, a study we conducted while I ran BPSR found that in many cases, each Immigration Officer had their own touts with whom they have a “special relationship.” This is very damaging for the reputation of the Service. Access to Passport Offices should be tightly controlled, right out to the perimeter of the office. Even if touts hang around outside the office, they should have no means of entering the premises. Citizens should be advised that any transactions with anyone not in Immigration uniform is carried out at their own risk. I remember when we piloted access control in the Federal Secretariat a few years ago. For the few days that we carried out the pilot, the Secretariat was like a ghost town. If the piloting had been carried out to full implementation, it would have become much more difficult for people to make the usual claim that the civil service is over-bloated. Many of those that hang around the Federal Secretariat are not actually civil servants.
To further reduce overcrowding in passport offices, the process for collecting passports should be made easier. It is possible to allocate days for collection based on surnames. For instance, people with surnames starting A to E could be allocated Mondays and those whose surnames start F to J allocated Tuesdays and so on. Of course, there should be a system to cater for those that need their passports more urgently and those that miss their appointments days, possibly including a small premium for them to pay if they have not used the fast-track service suggested earlier. It may also be possible to work with NIPOST on passport collection, either by having people collect them at post offices with proof of identification or having them delivered by post and signed for where there is a verifiable address.
Signage in most passport offices is poor. Many people arrive passport offices not knowing how much the official cost of the passport is. When a man in a government uniform tells you that the cost of a passport is a certain amount, you are entitled to believe them whether or not that is the official price. The official cost of obtaining a passport should be clearly displayed in all passport offices. There should also be a queuing system and clear signs about where to go next when you have finished one aspect of the process. These are changes that are not difficult to do. When I brought a similar issue to the attention of the Corps Marshall of the Federal Road Safety Commission, he implemented them over the course of one weekend. He had complained that they had signs showing the cost and process of obtaining a drivers’ license but that people, probably his officers, tear them off the very next day. We decided to have them printed as standing banners and it became a disciplinary offence for any head of a licensing office not to have the banners in place at all times. They are still there today.
Another pinch point for Nigerians is having to travel to Abuja to change names following marriage or to change any other details. While there are probably good security reasons for this, the Service should consider decentralising this, perhaps initially on a regional basis before it covers all states. Of course, the necessary precautions should be put in place to avoid abuse by unscrupulous officers. I am aware that there are good security and operational reasons for a lot of these kinds of constraints that people complain about, like change of name and changing dates of birth. However, the convenience of the citizen should not be compromised because we are not able to put in place adequate security and operational procedures to guard against abuse by officers. In this era of technology, it is easy to tell which officer has done what and hold them to account.
Incidentally, many Nigerians complain about the practice of the Immigration Service stamping all entries and exits in the passport. They wonder why the passport cannot simply be scanned, as the stamps use up valuable space in the passport booklets. While there are likely to be security reasons for this, even the DSS uses scans, rather than stamps.
I know how difficult it can be to change institutions and the way things are done. As the saying goes, everybody likes change but nobody likes to change. Managing change is difficult and takes time. There will always be a small minority will do everything they can to frustrate change. The Immigration Service is a paramilitary organisation, with its own ways of ensuring that orders are obeyed. However, if force and a command-and-control structure is all it takes, our Police Force would not be corrupt and there would be no illegal checkpoints on the roads. There is a need to win the hearts and minds of officers and to ensure that sufficient incentives are put in place to make bad behaviour unattractive. The question for every senior public servant must be “What will you be remembered for when you leave service?” CGI Mohammed Babandede has the opportunity to solve the perennial problem of passports before he retires. If he is able to do so, his name will be written in gold in the minds of most Nigerians. He has successfully tackled unprofessional behaviour at the airports, visa on arrival and many other difficult issues. I have no doubt whatsoever that he can also successfully make the issue of passport application, issuance and collection as painless as possible for Nigerians.
God bless the Nigeria Immigration Service. God bless Nigeria.