The Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Immigration Service, Muhammad Babandede, has revealed that the prevailing validity period for Nigeria’s international passports could be extended soon. The plan, as disclosed by Mr. Babandede on Saturday, is to raise the time limit within which the passports are valid from the current mark of five years to ten.
The Comptroller-General, while speaking with journalists over the weekend, said that the five-year limit had elicited complaints from many people, Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike, who had lamented that the specified validity period was too short. It was based on this dissatisfaction with the status quo that the announced action was to be taken, Mr. Babandede explained.
“They’re saying it should be 10 years, and we’re already considering that”, he said. “We need to take sure that we have an age validity expansion”.
There was also an allusion by Mr. Babandede to the rules applying to international passports in other countries, where, according to him, the validity of the passports depended in part on the age of the holder- in such places, people above the age of 18 had passports with a 10-year validity, while those below that age held passports that were valid for 5 years. He suggested that the proposed change was being made to get Nigeria back in line with the international norm, and away from what the public has long viewed as an unnecessarily restrictive time limit.
Premium Times quotes Mr. Babandede as saying that a memo regarding the change being proposed had been submitted to President Buhari and that he was optimistic that a positive report would be returned on the matter “soon”- a time frame which the newspaper describes as being within the coming months.