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A total of 4,591,055 passports have been produced by the Nigeria Immigration Service between August 2019 and May 2023.

Also, there were no fewer than 4,736,075 applications for passports within the period under review.

Our correspondent observed an exponential increase yearly in the number of passports produced by the service.

Data obtained from a document from the Ministry of Interior showed that in 2019, no fewer than  470,363 passports were produced; for the following year,  a total of 780,470 were printed while in 2021, 1, 057,908, passports were manufactured.

Similarly,  in 2022 a total of 1,621,703  passports were produced, and between January and May 2023, a total of 660,611 passports have so far been produced.

Also,  the document contained the number of all classes of visas issued by the service to foreign nationals.

It stated that a total of 342,766 visas were issued within the years under review.

A breakdown showed that 70,582 were issued in 2019; 70,874 in 2020; 94,681 in 2021; 78,282 in 2022, while between January and May 2023, a total of 28,347 visas were issued by the service.

Also,  within this period, visa categories were increased from six to 79.

The total number of international traveller movement into the country between August 2019 and May 2023 was put at 9,433,218.

In 2019, 1,123,754 movements were recorded; 1,579,667 in 2020; 2,750,846 in 2021; 2,998,306 in 2022 and 980,645 in 2023.

Within the period under review, more than 150,000 stolen and lost travel document records have been uploaded into the INTERPOL’s database.