A total of 370,000 have applied to the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) out of which only 4,120 representing federal character and all 774 local governments would secure employment.

The comptroller general, Muhammad Babandede who disclosed this on Thursday in Abuja, said out of the total number, 6,145 were invited for the training and all successful officers must undergo a drug test as no officer will be given a guy who is already addicted to drugs.

Also, he said there was no going back on the May 31st deadline of clearance of backlog of passports as so far, 23,907 are yet to be collected by applicants.

The CG who stated that so far, its Ikoyi office had the highest number of yet-to- be-all collected passports which are over 7,000, was set to produce between 130,000 and 150,000 passports between today and May 31st while locally, 58,000 will be produced to beat the deadline.

Reading that there will be no penalties against applicants who fail to collect their passports before May 31st, Babandede also added that a total of 41,000 new passports would be introduced into the system, adding that the highest production will be in Ikoyi, followed by Alausa.

397,000 applied for the jobs and there are only 4,120 slots. Each local government was represented and 10 per cent in each state were also invited based on merit and federal character.

So far, only three fake applicants were discovered and the cases were handed over to the police. The exercise will be at the end of this month and each officer who is successful must be made to undergo drug test.

130,000 passports will be produced and officers will work to ensure that we beat the deadline. We are going to work from 6am- 6pm including weekends to clear the backlog,

he said.

Justin Nwosu

Justin Nwosu is the founder and publisher of Flavision. His core interest is in writing unbiased news about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. He’s a strong adherent of investigative journalism, with a bent on exposing corruption, abuse of power and societal ills.