Minister of interior Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo has said that many crimes attributed to Nigerians abroad are actually committed by foreigners illegally holding Nigerian passports.
Speaking on Arise Television’s Morning Show on Wednesday, the minister expressed concern over the misuse of Nigerian passports by non-citizens, leading to global embarrassment and wrongful stigmatisation of Nigerians.
Tunji-Ojo emphasised the need for stricter pre-data documentation to safeguard the integrity of the country’s passport, which he described as a vital security and sovereign document.
He also called for measures to ensure that passports remain easily accessible to genuine Nigerian citizens while maintaining their credibility on the international stage.
“Passport is beyond a travel document, it’s a sovereign document of state. It belongs to the Nigerian government,” he said.
“For us to be sure that you are a Nigerian, upload your certificate of origin, out of which we have people we have across the 774 local web called the DVOs —Document Verification Officers. These people will go and authenticate those documents.
”Immediately you upload, it gets sent real-time to the local government where this thing is from. They authenticate it to be sure that you are a Nigerian and is getting a Nigerian passport.
“The embarrassment that we get as a country by people who are not Nigerians carrying Nigerian passport is out of this world.
”Most of the crimes that they say Nigerians are committing abroad, I say this clearly, a lot of them are not Nigerians.
“They are carrying Nigerian passport, if you do not have a certificate of origin, how am I supposed to be sure that you are a Nigerian?
“What is the evidence, what is the evidential facts to attest to the fact that you are a Nigerian?”
Tunji Ojo said inheriting data for renewal would eliminate the need for the current measures and citizens only need to upload pre-data documents once.
“So for me, I want to make passport easier, but not at the expense of national security; not at the expense of the integrity of the country,” he added.
“And I think these are desperate actions that we must take to sanitise the system.”
