By Dr. Joe Abah
Until August 2017, I was the
Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), with the
daunting task of reforming Nigeria’s Federal Public Service. As part of that
role, I sought to move the focus of Public Service Reforms away from the Public
Service unto the public. This was a deliberate tactical approach that sought to
change the approach to public service reforms from inputs to outcomes. Problems
with Public Service are often complex and intractable. There are various reasons
why Public Service Reforms are difficult in most environments and are
particularly difficult in developing countries, such as Nigeria.
In countries such as ours, the
public service reformer is often dealing with myriad systemic input problems in
the organisation he is trying to reform, including lack of electricity,
insufficient financial provision, lack of working tools, poor internet access,
poor staff motivation and systematic corruption. The combination of these and
any one of them for that matter is sufficient reason to explain away a lack of
improvement in public service delivery. Focusing on the outcome expected,
rather than the problems with the inputs, gives the reformer a better chance of
driving reforms in dysfunctional environments. The need to deliver the outputs
expected forces the system to align the required inputs to achieve the expected
outcomes, rather than focusing on the difficult task of trying to solve all the
input problems before we can get the improvements in service delivery that the
public expects and deserves. We will use the tortuous issue of obtaining a
Nigerian passport as a demonstration of how it could be done.
Many Nigerians go through a
painful, dysfunctional and extortionate process when they try to obtain an
international passport. Given its population and the absence of a focus on
outcomes by the Comptroller-General, Lagos residents suffer the most. It is virtually
impossible to obtain a Nigerian passport in Lagos without “knowing someone” and
paying above the official rate of N15,000 for a 32-page passport and N20,000
for a 64-page passport. Even after paying more than double the official price
and making obeisance to god-like Immigration officials, applicants are still
confronted with the claim that “there are no booklets.” The Comptroller-General
of Immigration often makes a categorical, but hollow, assertion that there are
sufficient booklets nationwide, but the experience of citizens is clearly
contrary to that claim. It is either that the Comptroller-General is being
economical with the truth or that his officers are deliberately making things
difficult in order to derive corrupt benefits from the dysfunction, and that
the Comptroller-General is not interested in doing anything about it.
Overcoming this logjam is relatively straightforward. Nigerians can obtain an
international passport in a week without needing to know anybody and without
paying a kobo more than the official price. In the next few paragraphs, I will
outline how this can be done.
The first step is for the
Presidency to demand from the Immigration Service the service standards for
issuing Nigerian passports. The last time, that I am aware of, such service
standards were set for passport issuance was under the SERVICOM regime in 2004.
At that time, the Immigration Service undertook to provide international
passports within one week, but expectedly within 72 hours. Most people,
including the Immigration Service, currently appear not to be aware of this
service standard. Nobody monitors performance against these standards, and
although passport issuance is part of the Ease of Doing Business initiative,
the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) has achieved
little or nothing in this regard. It is important for the Immigration Service
to commit to this standard, or revisit the standard and set a more realistic
one and make the targets publicly-known, and for PEBEC and the National
SERVICOM Office to publicly report the performance of the Immigration Service
against these standards.
In order to meet the existing
performance standard, or whatever new standard is set, it is necessary to take
a number of straightforward actions. First, all payments must be made online.
Notionally, this is already the case, but in practice, citizens are often
unable to make online payments, forcing them to have personal contact with
Immigration officers and their touts, who extract corrupt rents for “helping”
people. The payment systems are often unavailable, either due to weaknesses in
technical infrastructure or as a result of deliberate sabotage. Indeed, those
that “stupidly go and pay online” are made to suffer interminable delays and
forced to regret their attempts to do things properly. The Comptroller-General
and PEBEC should be monitoring the frequency of “network” downtimes by location
and tackling cases where the downtimes are as a result of deliberate sabotage.
The good thing about technology is that there is always an audit trail that
tells you who has done what to the system, at what time, in which location.
They should also be monitoring how quickly applicants that pay in advance
online receive their passports.
Even when an applicant successfully
pays online, another major pinch-point is the capture process. Nigeria does not
really have a passport renewal process. Every passport application is deemed to
be a new application requiring fresh biometric capture. This would ordinarily
not be a problem, particularly given the sensitive security nature of
international passports. The process of being “captured” is, however, another
corruption ‘toll gate.’ It should be possible to simply book an appointment for
capture online, appear on the appointed date and time and be captured within 15
minutes. Currently, the appointment system tends to give you an appointment in
6 years’ time when the validity of the passport you are applying for is only 5
years! This forces you to seek out an Immigration officer that will “help” you,
of course in the expectation of “appreciation.” There does not seem to be any
willingness on the part of the Immigration Service to apply the simple
technical fix required to make the appointment system work.
The Immigration Service knows the
number of passport applications that it gets each year. It also knows that
Nigeria’s population growth rate is 2.6%. How hard can it be to ensure that we
have enough booklets to cover all applicants? I mean really! Unlike National
Identity Cards, passports are not issued for free but for a fee. The Federal
Government should configure the Treasury Single Account to ensure that the fees
generated from passport issuance are used to ensure the availability of
passport booklets at all times. If, as a result of exchange rates, the price of
the passport is too low, especially as it is currently printed abroad, the
Immigration Service should review the price and gradually increase it over
time. Passport issuance is not a social service. Having said that, every effort
should be made to print passports in the country.
Every Nigerian knows that if you
give enough cash to Immigration officials, you can get your passport in less
than 6 hours. We also know that Nigerians like to leave things late, often
applying for a passport within just days of needing to travel. Of course, the
pressure of time on the applicant is a compelling reason why they would pay for
“help.” It is easy for the Passport Service to put in place an Emergency Fast
Track process that charges four times what the normal rate of passport
application is. Those that are in a hurry can pay N60,000-N80,000 per booklet
to government, rather than into the private pockets of Immigration officials,
and the funds can be reinvested into improving the passport process and even
incentivising Immigration officers. Those that are not in a hurry and can wait
a week, or whatever the new service target that the Service sets, can pay the
normal price and get their passports without begging or bribing anyone.
Finally, the recent data
integration between the Nigeria Immigration Service and the National Identity
Management Commission (NIMC) is commendable. When a Nigerian has a National
Identity Number issued NIMC, there is really no reason why they should not be able
to obtain their passport within one week of submitting all required
documentation. They should be able to pay online, book an appointment for
biometric capture, get captured within 15 minutes without begging or bribing
anybody, and be given an appointment for when to collect their passports. The
performance of the Immigration Service on each of these steps should be
monitored and publicly reported. Until this is possible, the One-Government
mantra in Executive Order E001 is simply hollow rhetoric, and the Vice
President’s recent charge that Nigerians should not pay a bribe to obtain a
passport simply a political statement. These suggestions are not new. They were
given to the Immigration Service in 2017 as part of a BPSR study on removing
the bottlenecks to passport issuance when I was the BPSR Director-General.
Before then, a SERVICOM assessment of the Passport Service in June 2006 came to
pretty much the same conclusions. The Immigration Service seems to lack the
willingness to address the issue and appears to have the power to get away with
it. The Vice President, who is the head of PEBEC, should use the power of his
office to ensure that they implement these recommendations and that the
Passport Service does not continue to get away with the current dysfunction in
passport issuance, to the detriment of Nigerians.
Dr Abah is the former
Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms. He is currently the
Country Director of DAI, a global development company. The views contained in
this article are personal to him and do not represent the views of any employer
past or present.
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Mtcheeew. Why can't we get it fast with the normal payment. Why triple the amount.
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