In January 2024, the Nigeria Immigration Service quietly piloted what may prove to be its most ambitious reform in two decades: a contactless biometric passport and a fully remote application platform.
The digital booklet looks familiar—green cover, gilded crest—but embedded inside is a next‑generation chip that stores the holder’s photo, signature, 10 fingerprints and an encrypted facial template.
Far more radical than the booklet itself is the way Nigerians can now apply. All they have to do is download the NIS Mobile App or visit www.passport.immigration.ng.
The entire application, officials say, can now be completed on a smartphone by logging into the upgraded portal, authenticating with National Identification Number, uploading a digital signature and paying a single consolidated fee via NIBSS or Remita.
Once an automated queue manager issues a QR‑code token, the applicant visits an enrolment centre only once for live‑capture. Production is decentralised to new MK‑Smart personalisation machines in Ikoyi, Enugu, Kano, Gwagwalada and London.
The technology itself is not revolutionary as it is standard ICAO 9303 compliance but if enforced, the process flow could starve touts and fraudulent officials of oxygen.
Payment caps coded into the gateway automatically flag any attempt to tag extra levies; status updates are pinged by SMS and e‑mail at every stage, reducing the need for physical follow‑ups.
Diaspora booklets, rather than joining diplomatic pouch consignments, will be personalised on‑site at high‑volume missions.
The migration, however, has one unforgiving requirement: citizens must refuse the shortcut.
“Any officer who asks for cash outside the portal is sabotaging this reform. Nigerians must help us by saying no,” the NIS Controller-General, Kemi Nandap, reiterated on January 2.
Analysts argue that public buy‑in is the true stress test. As long as some applicants still believe an agent’s backdoor is faster, insiders will service that demand.
According to a 2023 Budget policy brief, an average Nigerian applicant in Lagos visits the Ikoyi or Ikeja, Lagos passport office four times before collection and spends between N65,000 and N120,000. This was when the official fee for a five‑year booklet was N25,000.
Now that it is N50,000, a 10-year (64-page) passport costs N100,000 plus a N500 processing fee.
“Express” surcharges, middlemen (popularly known as passport agents), and systemic booklet shortages created a black market worth an estimated N45bn a year.
The misery is well documented—three-month backlogs at major commands such as Alimosho, Port Harcourt, and Kano. Diaspora Nigerians were forced to fly to Stockholm or Dublin after the London mission ran out of booklets. Countless scholarship deadlines, job offers, and medical referrals were missed.
Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji‑Ojo admitted last September that “passport administration has become a national embarrassment.” According to him, the new platform is the ministry’s flagship response.
A The Guardian report in April followed Obinna Eze, a UK‑based engineer, who paid the £120 official charge in November 2023, yet still waited six months for the status on his online dashboard to crawl beyond “personalisation pending”.
At Kaduna State University, 200 final‑year students feared losing Saudi scholarships because renewals stalled; traders in Port Harcourt told the BBC they slept outside the passport office from 4am to snatch one of 30 daily capturing tokens unless an “agent” collected N15,000 to do it for them.
Backlogs and bravado
When Tunji‑Ojo assumed office, he inherited 204,000 unprinted applications. By December, 2024 he told Channels Television, 190,000 had been cleared “without an extra kobo” from applicants.
His threat to sign dismissal letters for any immigration officer caught extorting money from the public was headline‑grabbing, but the problems run deeper than punitive memos.
Nandap, appointed CG of Immigration in January, 2024 supplied the bureaucracy to match the minister’s rhetoric.
In her maiden press briefing, she issued a 48‑hour desk‑time limit for every file and vowed to migrate 70 per cent of renewals online by December 2024.
A House committee presentation in February revealed an internal audit of all passport‑personalisation machines; any vendor who cannot guarantee 24‑hour uptime, Nandap warned, “will be delisted.”
Yet the human stories keep leaking from the queue. A policy brief by the Socio‑Economic Rights and Accountability Project collated 112 affidavits alleging bribes of between N 5,000 and N 80,000 for “file search”, “server fee” or “data correction”.
On X (formerly Twitter) a user, @MsFeyi, posted on May 5 , 2024 that her February payment at Ikoyi still showed “awaiting booklet.”
An officer, she claimed, whispered that N 50,000 could fix it.
“Does fast‑track mean printing money inside the booklet?” she queried.
Anatomy of bottlenecks
Why does a country that supplies programmers to Silicon Valley still print passports as if in 1988?
Immigration insiders trace the rot to five recurring pain‑points: artificial scarcity, server downtime, opaque tracking, Diaspora delays and multiple unofficial fees.
An insider who works at the NIS in Ikoyi told our correspondent on Tuesday during a visit to renew his passport, that booklets are sometimes hoarded until a ‘facilitation fee’ is paid.
“This is Nigeria. Most people are not as privileged as you to be a journalist and can just walk into the office and get their passport renewed.
“Sometimes, when they come, the portal has collapsed because of high traffic, forcing manual entries that reintroduce touts into the system.
“And for those who refuse to pay to be helped by an official, they will travel to the office repeatedly just to check the status of their passport, which may not be ready for another two or three months, depending on a lot of factors,” the source noted.
Digital public‑infrastructure
Beyond convenience, the e‑passport is also a building block in Nigeria’s wider digital public infrastructure agenda.
Linking the booklet to the NIN—and, by extension, the credit bureau, BVN and mobile SIM register—creates a single, verifiable identity across banking, health insurance and social‑protection platforms.
A technology‑governance scholar based in Lagos, Mr Yemi Oke, likens it to India’s Aadhaar ecosystem.
He said, “Once the passport chip is trust‑anchored to NIN, you can open a bank account, enrol for NHIS, even vote in the Diaspora elections (if it is finally approved by the National Assembly) without fresh KYC.”
India’s Aadhaar programme, launched nationally in 2010 and now covering more than 1.3 billion residents, offers a living blueprint of what such an ecosystem can achieve, and where the hazards lurk.
Aadhaar assigns each resident a 12‑digit number linked to fingerprints, iris scans and a facial template; the data lives on a central UIDAI server, but the holder carries only the number.
Nigeria’s new passport embeds similar biometrics in an ICAO‑compliant chip. While it is primarily a travel document, its linkage to the NIN effectively converts the booklet into a physical root‑ID token.
Also, Aadhaar’s most powerful feature is not the card but the public APIs that let banks, telecoms and welfare schemes run instant e‑KYC or payments authentication.
Tunji‑Ojo’s reform pairs the passport chip with NIN and the credit bureau/BVN lattice.
In principle, that allows any licensed service provider to ping a government API, read the chip or NIN, and confirm, with cryptographic assurance, that “Mrs So and So is who she says she is.”
Oke further speaking on the potential of Nigeria’s contactless passport and likening it to the Indian model, said, “India leveraged Aadhaar to put welfare stipends straight into beneficiaries’ bank accounts, eliminating the ‘ghost names’ that once swallowed up to 40 per cent of rural subsidy budgets.
“Nigeria’s equivalent dividend might sit in foreign missions: once high‑volume consulates receive on‑site personalisation machines and chip readers, diaspora Nigerians could renew passports, obtain emergency certificates or sign power‑of‑attorney documents in hours, not months.”
He also noted that domestic spin‑offs are equally potent.
Oke added, “With a universally trusted root ID, regulators could phase out multiple KYC cycles, no more scanning of voter cards, electricity bills and local‑government certificates each time one opens an account or registers a SIM.
“Banks could issue microloans in minutes; NHIA could authenticate enrollees at any clinic via chip readers, curbing fraud in the insurance pool. These are precisely the efficiencies Aadhaar unlocked for Indian micro‑finance and health‑benefit schemes.”
From touts to trust
Aadhaar reduced India’s “form middle‑men” because verification moved online. Likewise, the Nigerian contactless passport can strangle the tout economy that thrives on artificial scarcity, but only if every agency integrates the chip/NIN rails and citizens refuse cash shortcuts.
UIDAI succeeded partly because banks, telcos and state governments were compelled to adopt the platform.
Compulsory integration, coupled with a clean grievance channel, will decide whether Nigeria’s e‑passport evolves beyond a smarter booklet into a true digital‑public‑infrastructure backbone.
Both projects share a founding insight: a nation cannot modernise payments, welfare, or travel if identity itself remains slow, fragmented or forgeable.
Aadhaar has shown that once identity is solved at a population scale, innovation follows like water through newly laid pipes.
Nigeria’s contactless passport, anchored to a strengthened NIN, offers an African adaptation of that lesson. If the political will endures, the queues at Ikoyi may shrink today, but the deeper reward will be tomorrow’s frictionless banking, border‑crossing and service delivery for 220 million Nigerians.
Internationally, carriers welcome the upgrade. “Contactless verification at e‑gates trims boarding time and reduces forged‑document risk,” says Simon Cook, operations lead for a Gulf carrier that moves 7,000 Nigerian passengers weekly.
IATA’s 2024 travel‑facilitation report notes that countries adopting chip‑embedded documents cut average immigration processing time from six minutes to 90 seconds.
The cost of failure
If the reforms stall, the drain on human capital is measurable. A 2023 poll by SBM Intelligence found that 47 per cent of respondents deferred overseas study or work because of passport delays; 19 per cent missed at least one visa appointment. For the diaspora remittance pipeline, which is worth a World Bank‑estimated US$20 billion in 2022, every flight forgone is lost forex.
At home, the reputational hit is harsher. Business‑traveller Eniola Akinyemi recounts missing a conference in Nairobi after chasing a renewal for five months.
“Kenyan colleagues got theirs in a week. They now call ours the ‘green delay’,” he told our correspondent in a chat.
Can the tide turn?
The backlog blitz of 2023 proved that capacity, when marshalled, exists. What remains is sustained transparency. Independent monitors suggest publishing weekly production statistics per command, naming officers sanctioned for extortion, and keeping the complaint hotline truly toll‑free. Civil‑society bodies such as SERAP and BudgIt propose a “passport dashboard” similar to the Central Bank’s FX queue tracker.
Citizens have a role too: apply only through the official portal, insist on e‑receipts, and document any request for unofficial fees.
The contactless passport can bury our culture, but only if applicants refuse to feed it.
For now, queues still snake outside Ikoyi, and several news houses’ cameras still find traders on cardboard mats before dawn.
Yet there is a tentative optimism in the air, an expectation that the little green booklet may soon carry a chip and, with it, the assurance that securing one no longer requires prayer, bribery, or both.
