Rauf Aregbesola, Minister of Interior, has pledged his commitment to sanitizing professional service providers’ specialized services by improving the processing of visas, passports, marriages, and citizenship applications.
Mr Afonja Ajibola, the ministry’s Deputy Director of Press and Public Relations, made the announcement on Saturday in Abuja.
According to him, the minister made the commitment at the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) Headquarters during a Quarterly Review Meeting with some consultant-special service providers hired by the ministry.
The minister reiterated the importance of performance review, adding that the meeting had helped in addressing challenges experienced by service providers and serving as a platform to identify problems that often contributed to inefficient service delivery.
He, therefore, decried passport procedure racketeering perpetrated with the connivance of unscrupulous officials, urging them to desist from the embarrassing act or be prepared to face dire consequences.
The minister identified the human factor as responsible for the artificial scarcity of passport booklets in passport offices across the country.
Aregbesola, however, urged NIS to beam its searchlight on erring officers bent on exploiting passport and visa applications processing to feather their nest.
He commended the service providers for being worthy partners in attaining effective public service delivery to members of the public who accessed their services on application and processing for visas, passports, marriages and citizenship acquisition.
MEETING: Aregbesola, Kukah, Sultan, Others In Abuja (PHOTOS)
The minister urged them to strictly adhere to agreements governing the Public Private Partnership (PPP) pact with the ministry.
He also seized the opportunity to commend President Muhammadu Buhari for giving approval for the implementation of standard security features on Nigerian passports.
This, he said, had so far made Nigeria one of the top five nations in the world with such passport quality due to the upgrade on the initial e-passports.
Earlier, the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Dr Shuaib Belgore, commended the minister for the initiative that provided for the type of platform for robust engagement with the engaged service providers.
Belgore said that previous quarterly meetings had yielded expected results through improvement on an array of services being provided by the service providers.
He urged them to use the opportunity of the meetings to further open up on new solutions to impediments militating against effective service in their areas of engagement.
Meanwhile, in the course of the meeting, all engaged service providers made presentations on their services with professionalism, technology deployment, staff attitude, response time and other indicators as key.
The consulting service providers are Euphoria Press Ltd., Messrs IRRIS SMART TECHNOLOGY Ltd., Thebes Global Resources Ltd., Greater Washington Express as well as Dataware Solutions.
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