The Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has said that the home delivery of international passports to Nigerians will commence from June this year.
The Minister outlined the plans for the service to Nigerians on Friday at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja.
Tunji-Ojo spoke during the inspection of the electronic gates at the new terminal of the airport.
He said the home delivery service, to be provided by the Nigeria Immigration Service, will first be made available in Lagos State; Port Harcourt in Rivers State; Kano State; and Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
For those in the diaspora, he said the home delivery would initially cover the United States of America and United Kingdom, explaining that the delay in the launch of the service was due to lack of data centres.
Tunji-Ojo said: “We have completed the whole solution, but when we came on board, we realised that the data centre was not really there.
“We were leveraging a private company data centre and we appreciate them for that assistance.
“We think that it is better to create a permanent solution to problems rather than quick fixes.
“We could have done it in February but we had to build our data centre from scratch to be able to keep the integrity of our data and national security intact.
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“This is more important.
“It is disgraceful that NIS is 61 years old and NIS is a custodian of biometric data of Nigeria and we believe that NIS should be in charge of the data of Nigeria.
“It is not acceptable that this data is domiciled in a third party and that is why we have been able to do this.”