Immigration job: Reps query Interior Minister on N1,000 levy

Minister of Interior, Abba Patrick Moro, laboured hard on Tuesday as he tried to explain the N1,000 fee charged applicants seeking to enlist into the Nigeria Immigration Service, insisting that the sum was approved by Federal Character Commission.
The minister spoke on Tuesday whenmembers of the House of Representatives Committee on Interior visited the ministry.  The House had recently passed a resolution calling for the refund of the controversial fee.
But Moro, responding to verbal query by a member of the committee, said he was not aware of the House resolution, noting that it may have been passed when he was outside the country.
He, however, told the committee members who were on oversight visit that the fee was approved to avert recurrence of past exercise that ran into hitch, adding that the fee was meant to assist the consultant handling the recruitment to process the huge number of applications.
But it was not only the application fee that generated controversy, as the ministry also failed to give the committee a satisfactory explanation on how it spent over N2.2 billion appropriated to it this fiscal year and for which over 50 per cent releases have been made.
The minister had said: “I am very sorry for the discrepancies; I also agree that we ought to have sat down as a ministry and done the proper work to avoid the discrepancies you have identified.”
Moro had in his presentation, requested for additional funding to meet increasing challenges, including the construction of border plazas across the 84 approved border points in the country.
But the committee cited numerous discrepancies in the budget performance presented by the ministry, which, it said, contradicted the work done.