THE MINISTER WHO FIXED THE QUEUE

Bunmi Tunji-Ojo, Minister of Interior, is making a difference, writes JOSHUA J.OMOJUWA

Nigerians are not a generous people when it comes to public officers, and there is a reason for it. Most of us have hardly had an encounter with the Nigerian state that ended well, so praise feels like something we are being tricked into. When something does work, the instinct is to check twice.

The plainest test of any ministry is whether an ordinary citizen’s dealings with it became less humiliating. On that test, the Ministry of Interior has done something rare in Nigerian public administration. In late 2023, the Nigeria Immigration Service was sitting on a backlog of 204,332 passport applications. This was not an abstraction. Students were missing school resumption, patients were missing treatment abroad, and traders were missing their own businesses. The backlog was cleared within roughly three weeks.

Clearing a backlog is one thing. Deploying a solution that ensures it does not happen again is another. The passport regime ran on 96 decentralised personalisation centres, which is to say 96 separate points at which a Nigerian could be told to ‘come back tomorrow.’ That was consolidated into a single centralised processing centre, application moved online, and delivery to home and office followed. The queue was abolished as an organising principle, which is a different thing entirely and much harder to do.

Every one of those 96 centres was somebody’s revenue. Reform in Nigeria almost never fails on the idea. It fails on the constituency the idea disturbs. In one swoop, those who were profiting on that anomaly were out of business.

I landed in Nigeria the other day, swiped my passport and was out of the airport in minutes. It felt like I had missed several steps and I was not sure I had not bypassed something. It was that fast. What sits behind that experience is recognisably the work of an engineer rather than a politician. Electronic visas. Landing and exit cards. Advance Passenger Information, which allows passenger data to be analysed before an aircraft lands rather than after. The Migration Information Data Analysis System. The Centralised Interior Management and Administration System, which lets the agencies under the ministry actually see each other’s data. Bunmi Tunji-Ojo ran an indigenous ICT firm before he entered politics, and it shows. He has treated the Ministry of Interior as a data problem wearing a uniform, which is precisely what it is.

The results extend past travel documents. At the Civil Defence Corps, the Mining Marshals were created to police mining sites, with more than three hundred illegal operators arrested and over a hundred prosecuted. The Federal Fire Service has improved response times and begun remodelling its academy into a regional institution. Through the Civil Defence, Correctional, Fire and Immigration Services Board, some 64,000 officers were promoted between 2023 and October 2024.

But the single most creditable thing this minister has done is the one that carried the most personal risk.

In November 2024, he inaugurated an independent panel to investigate allegations of corruption, abuse of power and related failures inside the Nigerian Correctional Service, an agency directly under his own supervision. The panel spent 16 months on the work, visited 86 custodial centres across 23 states, and reported this year. Nigerian ministers commission panels the way other people take paracetamol, usually to make an embarrassment stop hurting. This one was allowed to run long, go wide and return with findings the ministry has said it will implement.

This is why the next half of this piece is worth writing. I have come to ask for more. The reward for good work is more work.

Start with the panel report. The panel’s own secretary, Professor Uju Agomoh, has asked publicly that the findings be made available to Nigerians. She is right, and the argument is not about transparency as a virtue. It is about durability. Let the public own it. That way it becomes our collective responsibility to enforce it, now or in the future, irrespective of who becomes the next Minister of Interior. It would become a telling legacy of the Tunji-Ojo tenure.

Then the numbers that define the custodial problem. By the minister’s own disclosure this June, capacity stands at roughly 68,496 while the inmate population is about 80,732. That gap of more than 12,000 human beings is the issue, and the uncomfortable truth is that most of it is not within his purview. People are in those cells because courts put them there and did not come back for them. Which means the next phase of this work cannot be a ministry project at all. It has to be a standing mechanism binding the ministry, the judiciary and the state attorneys-general, with the non-custodial options already provided in the Correctional Service Act of 2019, parole, community service and suspended sentences, actually used rather than admired. We cannot build-more-cells our way to this solution.

There is also a discipline here worth institutionalising. This ministry already measures itself. Passport turnaround, visa processing, inmate admissions and releases, these are all being tracked internally. Publish them. A monthly public dashboard would cost the ministry nothing it does not already produce, and it would convert performance into something citizens can verify rather than something they are asked to accept. More pressure, but worthy pressure.

Finally, the visa reforms. We appear to now have an efficient electronic visa regime, but the residence permit process still takes months to resolve. That is a headache investors could do without.

Here is the deeper thing Tunji-Ojo has accomplished, probably without intending it. Every Nigerian who collected a passport in days rather than months now carries a piece of evidence. The evidence says that the dysfunction we have been taught to accept as cultural, or structural, or simply Nigerian, was never any of those things. It was a choice, made by people who had the option of choosing otherwise.

He has made the excuses of every other ministry considerably harder to believe. That is a strange sort of public service, and it may prove the most useful thing he has done.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing