Immigration Boss to publish officials with illegal Nigeria’s diplomatic passports
Immigration Boss to publish officials with illegal Nigeria’s diplomatic passports
By GoBroadsheet
The Comptroller General of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Martin Abeshi, has threatened to publish names of government officials and politicians illegally holding on to Nigeria’s diplomatic passports despite requests for them to return them.
He also said the immigration service recently lost three of its officers to insurgency in the North East region.
Mr. Abeshi stated this while unfolding his programme for the agency in Abuja on Thursday.
He said so far only 200 former government officials had returned their diplomatic passports despite a directive by the Federal Government to them to return the documents.
He said, “I want to use this time to re-emphasize that the collection of diplomatic passports from government official who are no more in the service has been encouraging.
“We have collected over 200 so far, but very soon we will publish the names of defaulters. But I am appealing to them to please bring them before we publish their names.”
He said President Muhammadu Buhari appointed him as CGI last month to fight corruption at the passport offices, airports and other departments of the service.
Mr. Abeshi said the NIS was preparing a document that would be help to effectively control the movement of Nigerians in and out of the border areas.
He explained that the current method of managing Nigeria’s borders had become archaic going by the technological advancement being witnessed all over the world.
According to him, the document would be presented to the government soon.
The CGI said the NIS now had a new Immigration Act, which would check passport racketeering.
“The Act provides for penalties to be meted out to officers who abuse the passport process. If you do it you will be charged to court and if found guilty, imprisoned,” he added.