The Federal Government has said that about 159 Nigerians renounced their Nigerian citizenship in 2022.
Rauf Aregbesola, the minister of interior, disclosed this when he appeared at the 64th weekly media briefing organised by the Presidential Media Team, at the State House, Abuja, on Thursday.
Aregbesola said while 309 renounced their Nigerian citizenship between 2006 and 2022, “a total of 159 left the country and renounced their citizenship of Nigeria, in 2022, alone”
According to him, a total of 350 application for naturalisation are currently being processed, while the ministry will meet in February, to shortlist those eligible for Nigerian citizenship.
Aregbesola said that the number of Nigerians leaving the country has placed pressures on the issuance of Nigerian Passports, as a total of 1.7m passports, the highest ever, were produced last year alone.
Aregbesola also that the Federal Fire Service saved a total of N25.22 trillion properties in eight years, while properties worth N3.18 trillion were destroyed over the period
“We saved 2,000 lives, while 366 lives were lost to fire, from 2015 to date”
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Speaking on the shortage of passports and the challenges encountered by Nigerians in the diaspora, the minister said the Federal Government has embarked on reformation, including digitising the passport issuing process, which will make issuance seamless.
He stated that while the Ministry is working to resolve issues with Ministry of Foreign Affairs on arrangements to ease passport for Nigerians in the diaspora.
“Temporary electronic passports are being issued in cases of emergency, for one way trip only, to replace emergency travel certificates with three months validity.
“We issued a total of 1.7m passports with over 200,000 booklets, still in our custody, adding that “we recorded over 80 percent in terms of performance compared with the number of passport applications received last year.
The minister also disclosed that over 70 citizens of South Korea, Egypt Siri Lanka and host of others, were deported on the orders of the ministry, last year.
On expatriate quota abuse, Aregbesola said the ministry was working on reducing expatriate quota from 10 years to 7, as well as limiting it to only jobs on critical list that cannot be performed by Nigerians.
“We have created online linkages for expatriates quota and ensured that Nigerian graduates are employed to understudy the expatriates, for smooth succession.
The minister, who also said that 297 projects were monitored and evaluated within the period under review, added that the ministry was constructing a new custodial centre in Kano that will house about 3000 inmates when completed.
He said that the Nigeria Correctional Service was training officers on arms handling to deal with issues of incessant attacks to which the agency has been subjected in recent year.
“We are now mandating officers to carry arms to respond appropriately to those who may want to violate facilitates of the correctional services.”
