Most crimes attributed to Nigerians abroad are committed by foreigners with our passport – Tunji-Ojo
Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the Minister of Interior, has expressed concern over the widespread possession of Nigerian passports by foreigners, describing it as a source of global embarrassment and a factor in the misattribution of crimes to Nigerian citizens.
Speaking on Arise Television’s Morning Show on Wednesday, December 18, the minister stressed the importance of pre-data documentation to safeguard the integrity of Nigeria’s passports, noting that their reliability is currently in question.
”Passport is beyond a travel document; it’s a sovereign document of state. It belongs to the Nigerian government,” Tunji-Ojo said. He explained that stricter measures are being introduced to verify the nationality of applicants.
“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 passports is out of this world,” he said.
“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 passports. 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?”
“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 sanitize the system.”
