E-immgration: NIS captures 11,000 immigrants in Ogun

The Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS), Ogun State Command, on Thursday, said no fewer than 11,000 immigrants has been registered since in the E-Immigration commencement in August.

This was disclosed by NIS Controller in the State, Comptroller Doris Braimah, while receiving in audience the Consul-General of the Ghanian High Commission and his team at her office in Abeokuta.

Braimah said the Command is aiming to register close to 20,000 migrants before the end of the amnesty period on the 11th of January,2020.

She said that the command was working round the clock to meet the deadline.

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“So far, we’ve registered over eleven thousand migrants in this command and we are still registering.  Averagely in a day, we do over a hundred and we work even weekends to ensure that we meet up the deadline.

“We are hoping that before the end of the registration amnesty period that we should be able to have close to twenty thousand migrants registered. The exercise would come to an end on the 11th of January, 2020. We are working round the clock in this command and other commands across the country to ensure that we meet the deadline,” she said.

She also added that the command had been able to register over five hundred Ghanian residents in the state, insisting that only migrants resident in the state would be registered.

The Consul-General, Mr James Nyasembi, in his remarks asked for an extension for some of its people who might not be able to meet up with the deadline for the E-Immigrants registration exercise currently going on in the country.

He commended the Federal government, through the  Nigerian Immigration Service for deeming it fit to include foreign nationals residing in the country in its planning process.

“We also want to state at this point that we have a large number of Ghanaian population in Nigeria across the federation. We don’t have the real estimate but we think we have about 700,000 Ghanaian residing here. So, we have a large figure here and also we are aware that this exercise is just about five months or so and looking at the pace of the issuance of the registration.

We know there would be a big backlog even at the end of the exercise and we want to use the occasion today to bring to your notice and to plead with you that after the five months, we will still have some people who may not register and we want to use the occasion to request that you still assist them to do the registration,” he said.

Nyasembi said that his visit was a follow up to the E-Immigration exercise that commenced about five months ago.

He added that the Embassy in Nigeria had embarked on educating Ghanian citizens residing in the country on the need to key into the programme.

He assured that all Ghanaian nationals without valid means of identification residing in the country would be issued new identity cards to fast track the process.