-4th-june-2016,
By Nwana A. c.
The change agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari has received positive reviews so far from the United States of America. Many American businesses appear ready to take a chance again on Nigeria. But some are beginning to develop cold feet so soon because many tales on Nigeria are still very emblematic of the inept shadow of the immediate past regime.
Perhaps many factors contribute to the bad image, but none has been more annoying than the case of the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS). For example, the process of obtaining ordinary Nigerian Visa or Passport defies common sense. The primary headache is Innovate 1 Services, a maladroit company contracted during the past regime by the NIS to process passport/Visa applications. Quite frankly, it is not an overstatement to quip that the old NEPA was by far more efficient. At least Nigerians could easily relate to the voices at the then NEPA. Put differently, besides the prevailing challenges at the Innovate 1 Services, the contractor also has the audacity to outsource the few jobs from a critical component of Nigerian national security to our Indian friends whose relentless brawl with the English language makes a typical Nigerian sound like an Englishman. Yet, millions of our highly qualified citizens roam the streets home and abroad in search of any kind of job.
Make no mistake about it, many would care less if the Innovate 1 Services and its “Oyibo” staff could provide the desired service. But the reverse is obviously the case here. In fact, nothing seems to work right in that company from web technology, applications, method of payment, customer service, and what have you. Attorney Stefano Fabeni, the Executive Director, Global Initiatives for Human Rights at Heartland Alliance in Washington, DC, had a first-hand experience and was able to tweet the matter exactly how it belongs: “Applying for #Nigerian visa with Innovate 1 services is a nightmare. They should NOT be allowed to operate in the US.”
As a foreigner, Fabeni’s harrowing account was on Visa, but the passport process for our citizens in the USA is even worse. Not only do these fellow Nigerians have to grapple with the Innovate 1 Services system, those who live outside the regions where the embassies or consulates are located incur costs of an average of $1,000 to obtain a common passport. To mitigate the costs, the Nigerian Embassy designed an intelligible intervention program whereby passport services are entertained in major cities outside the consulates. However, apart from a potpourri of unprintable details, the intervention program itself is fraught with two daunting challenges.
First, the exercise is extremely time-consuming in a country where time matters most. The reason offered for this failure is that each consulate office in the USA is equipped with only two Immigration bio-data capturing machines. To that end, a consulate can only afford to lend one machine for interventions, and understandably so, since the other machine must remain at the consulate for its normal operations. Second, the consulate does not seem to have the desired number of staff to contain the type of volume usually generated from the passport interventions.
No comments:
Post a Comment