 Welcome back to The Breakfast. An investigative report a few days ago shocked many Nigerians with the details and the bits of information that were released by investigative journalist David Hundei. It basically was exposed in loads of corruption that were going on in the Nigerian immigration service and the reasons why Nigerians may have been struggling to get their passports in time. We're speaking this morning with that investigative journalist David Hundei who's joining us. Good morning and thanks for your time this morning. Good morning. Good morning thanks for having me. Alright so it must have taken you some time to put this you know information together do as much research as possible but I want us to start with you telling us the biggest findings for you in this you know report that you put out. Okay so for me there were three major findings and in order of importance I would say the third most important finding was that first of all within the Nigerian immigration service there seems to be like a whole other set of processes that the public is not aware of. Processes which are not written on anyway which sort of the people the civil servants involved just kind of make it up as they go along. So when you go and apply for passports and you pay your $30,000 or however much it is you don't really understand the politics going on in there and why it is that you may not get it. You may get a passport in a month you might get it in a year depending on who is handling your case depending on what part of the country the person handling your case is from depending on which passport office you apply that so for example if you apply that decoy passport command it will be a very low possibility that you get to come out in the reasonable space of time. So when I spoke to people in and around the immigration service I was able to ascertain that there is a very it's unstated but very blatant policy of Northernization going on in the immigration service which I actually started on the previous country in general which has continued into this regime where the postings that are considered to be desirable such as leaders and Abuja have been given exclusively to immigration officers of Northern origin while the Southern officers have been transferred out to places like Sokoto and whatnot. I was the first finding the second finding in order of importance was that the company that actually prints these passports is a lot more powerful than Nigerians are aware of this company essentially has the power to create Nigerian citizens out of in there. This company has full control of the supply chain of Nigerian passports from end to end so it handles the information capture, the database management and also subcontracts the printing to a Malaysian company and the company is so powerful that the federal government actually is not even in a position to retrieve the contract from this company because this company essentially has made it so that I don't know how it was how it happened like that that the contract that was signed made it such that the company alone has access to certain things that even the Nigerian immigration service is not able to carry out maintenance work on the databases of the Nigerian passport system is not able to carry out any basic physical maintenance on the systems if the system goes down at any passport office officers of Nigerian immigration office literally cannot do anything about it it's the company called ISTL which has to come in and sort everything out so the immigration service essentially is less powerful than this private entity that nobody has ever heard of. This private company is more powerful within the immigration space than the Nigerian immigration service itself and then the most important finding was that the person who actually runs this company the owner of this company is someone who under no circumstances is supposed to hold such a contract which is so critical to Nigeria's national security this person used to be a diplomat and this person was dismissed from the diplomatic service in the early 1980s after being invited for drug trafficking using his diplomatic status and his diplomatic immunity to traffic drugs into the United States so there's why I go hold of court documents from the United States District Court of New Jersey dating back to 1979 which essentially contained a full indictment seven-page indictment of this this diplomat his name is Alain Katfisher Alain Katfisher and then also detailed the the the allegations against his other the other members of his drug ring who sort of ratted each other out and the story became very clever this person was contacted by an American businessman called Tracy Wong who was working with a committed drug dealer called Anthony Margaret and Tracy Wong basically brought this diplomat into the operation and look we have millions of dollars worth of cocaine that is being trafficked from South America and Asia I mean want to bring it into the U.S. but we want you to help us bring it into the U.S. because you are a diplomat so you have diplomatic immunity your bags are not searched we are traveling into the U.S. you have an opportunity to traffic drugs that most people do not bear in mind that this fellow was not just an ordinary diplomat it was a very senior diplomat it was like the second secretary of Nigeria's mission to the U.N. and they made to late 1970s so according to court documents so sorry go ahead go ahead we can hear you yeah okay so according to the court documents between for at least three years from 1978 onward he was working with this drug ring and pushing millions of dollars worth of cocaine into the U.S. and for each for each trip he was paid they were paid approximately 50,000 U.S. dollars at his cut and this person was dismissed from the service and for whatever reason even though he was the U.S. had called for him to be extradited he was particularly shielded was protected by Nigerian government for whatever reason we can only speculate as to what reason there was maybe he was working with someone in the government he was working on behalf of someone maybe he had a godfather in the government we don't know and he disappeared from the public eye and then reappeared in 2003 under President Abbasan Joe as the CEO of this company ISTL and somehow go hold of this contract and you know somehow this with that kind of past is awarded a contract the sole contract to create Nigerian passport booklets and to maintain the the information database of Nigerian passport holder so essentially if you hold in Nigerian passports like the Nigerian e-passport all your details are in the hands of a an indicted drug trafficker which I found completely absurd and the fact that the DSS which I mean you and I know that in some cases even if you're going to handle just something as simple as a road contract in Nigeria the DSS will vet you to your third generation so it was kind it was just very surprising to me that how is it that such a person who under no circumstances even by the origin of the the public procurement act of 2007 should have been nowhere near you know being given this kind of procurement contract was cleared somehow by the security services to hold not just the public contract but that's kind of public contract with such severe implications for Nigeria's national security so I thought that that was a story that definitely needed to be told okay David this really is explosive lots of allegations here and mr Fisher you mentioned is one of three people you say had so much influence in the Nigerian immigration service tell us more about the other two people so if the first I was mentioned was the immediate past control general that is Mohammed Babandidi and based on the conversations that I had with the sources in and around the service mr. Bradley essentially was the one who obviously you know without saying so explicitly instituted the modernization policy in Niger immigration service whereby the starting with the great possible command specifically which is which is perceived to be in the service as some of the most desirable place we posted in Nigeria in terms of you know making money that that command was essentially fully modernized the majority of the southern the officers of southern extraction working they were transferred out and replaced with northern officers whose basically whose goal there was was to make money and this was repeated in a project and in sort of the more desirable postings across the country such that in Lagos for example where there are three officers only one of these past officers is staffed by a southerner and the other two which are staffed by northerners are sorry the the passport office in a mode of face headed by southerner the other two which are headed by northerners are staffed almost entirely by northerners and this is a pattern that repeats itself across the country that was the first part of what he was responsible for the second thing he did was that during his tenure the payment system for paying the son the wages and entitlements of Nigerian vision service staff was moved to the IPPIS which is sort of the system that handles a civil service and and an armed forces payments in Nigeria however the thing that this had was that it completely removed all transparency from from the payments of the Nigerian vision service system so essentially when I spoke to the sources what they told me was that they don't know how much is coming into the accounts at the end of the month when the new officer is hired the new officer really doesn't actually know how much he or she is going to get paid they simply don't know so the deductions vary wildly from month to month so let's say for the sake of an example let's say your salary is 80,000 there this month the deductions might be 12,000 and next month deduction and 27,000 you have no idea what it's for how much is going to get deducted what it's going to come into your account at the end of the month so what this has done is that it has created this sort of ad hoc culture within the NIS where everybody's just desperately trying to make money whichever way they can if you know which obviously for a service whose main whose main public-facing activity is issuing passports and obviously passports are in demand in Nigeria always in demand and people are willing to pay premiums for those so that then creates that situation where everybody is trying desperately to make money off the passport distribution process so when there's a huge passport shortage you know apart from the issues with the supply chain of the passport booklet itself we point the company that press them in Malaysia having forex issues and whatnot one of the major problems with the major reasons why Nigeria cannot access booklets you know in a reasonable space of time is because there's so much arbitrage going on and there are so many hands that need to be greased because of these IPPS this rushed IPPI supplementation which has taken a transparency away so everyone within the British Service is trying to make money at the expense of Nigerians who are just trying to get their passports so and then the third person mentioned was Abdulai Leeman who is the PCO he's a deputy country general he's in charge of the Kauai Passport Command which as I mentioned earlier is one of the most important passport commands in Nigeria now every source I spoke to about this fellow had very uncomplimentary things to say about him but essentially that this is the spearhead of of modernization in Nigerian British Service that this guy didn't just ensure that most of the southerners working at the PCO's passport command were transferred out and replaced with northern as with his kinsmen but he takes it to such ridiculous extents as for example speaking exclusively house during work hours so you're a southern immigration officer working at their passport command you don't speak house you have to disadvantage because he's more likely to have conversations with even your subordinates even your juniors your presence and you don't understand what they're saying that's picking house and your presence and that for example where there's a southern officer there's not an officer working together maybe doing a the data capture and it's safe time for for for Muslim prayer or something and the northern officer who is obviously Muslim would just get up and go out to say it's going to pray and the southern officer has to continue working you know essentially doing two people's work and that this is officially sanctioned by Lima that is how things are done at the PCOE passport command now that this obviously has had a predictable effect on staff morale within southern ranks has also created the conditions for ethnic and religious conflict within the PCOE passport command of the NIS and that he himself is his major his second major you know go apart from the organization of the PCOE passport man is also to make money so under him there are also opaque processes which are not written down anyway which are part of the the process of issuing a passport there's there are things that didn't include in the reports because they were they were just sort of things that that the sources said but they're very difficult to independently confirm but essentially that this the when you simply walk into the PCOE passport command and we do your data capture and you pay your money and you expect a passport to come out within the same month but you really don't know what is going on because there is an entire network of arms that needs to be greased there are sort of ad hoc processes that have been instituted which are not part of the official stated process anywhere which Adulai Liman has sort of put in place for the so with the so express intention of making money and making money for for his cronies so to speak and that this has destroyed staff morale this has made it even harder for people to access passports the PCOE passport command has the largest backlog of of passport production in the country and funny enough I'll just think to mention this if I go back to you funny enough in almost almost as soon as the story came into the public domain came to the public space the the new culture general of immigration that's which is Jerry immediately ordered the a task force to be deployed to the equally passport command to deal with its backlog because I'm sure even within the immigration service it was quite well known that on the leadership the PCOE passport command had a huge and unjustifiable backlog and for the purposes of of optics it was expedient to do something about that now they were also from from my sources within the NIS Adulai Liman has also be someone that which has been issued a query has been someone out there for his boss so we wait and see what the outcome of that would be well I there's so much you know to unpack from all of this you know and I've heard people complain many times you know that online you know together 9 dream passports about 13 or 17 thousand but when you go to the office you end up paying as much as 45 or 50,000 naira if you hope to get it you know and nobody has ever been able to understand why it is that high and you know if you speak with them they tell you they need to buy diesel they need to settle here they need to be you know just many me frivolous excuses but that has gone on for a long time and I'm sure it makes you wonder how much really gets back to the government compared to how much gets into pockets and the millions and maybe even billions of Naira that is made in that office that never gets back to government coffers but that's that's an angle you know and it's on the so now I want you to speak more on these discussion on online online cafe sure and how his position may be maybe dangerous to the Nigerian you know to Nigeria itself and those who have their information with the ISTL why is this a problem that he is in your cousin head of ISTL and he has access to this information but so it's important to know the ISTL itself doesn't actually print passport booklets so it's affiliated with the Malaysian company called Iris corp which actually does printing the they do security printing not just for Nigeria but for a number of African jurisdictions as well yeah so they do things like printing passport booklets printing currency bills that sort of thing now ISTL essentially is to all the tests and purposes it takes support because they don't actually have any sort of physical products what they do is essentially database management and equipment management on behalf of the NIS now essentially what these contracts with ISTL does is that it makes it near impossible for the immigration service to actually wield control over the data that you and I submit when it goes to the office your biometric data your bio data all those things the database those things are saving is an ISTL database now the database has been and the equipment were paid for by the federal government and they're not paid for with public funds they're paid for public funds right but the total control over the database and the equipment that makes database possible is vested in ISTL so essentially the government is subservient to this private entity which it gave a contract to essentially the day that ISTL decides that something isn't going to work it's not going to work and the NIS can do nothing about it and so you just give an example of this in 2017 there was the initial contract is awarded 2007 for 10 years 2017 when the contract ran out there was a huge theory because people within the NIS at the senior levels were grumbling that this contract should not be renewed this contract is bad for national security this contract gives too much power to ISTL and there were indications that there was a power toss between ISTL and people who wanted the contract taking away obviously the people who wanted the contract taking away were not necessarily doing so for altruistic purposes they probably have their own interests that they were trying to serve but according to what I hear some of them had their own companies that they wanted to use to replace ISTL not necessarily to change status quo but putting that aside in 2019 all of a sudden we just heard that the contract has been renewed after the matter dragged on for two years and why was it renewed essentially because the Nigerian government didn't have a choice ISTL has Nigerian governments with his hands tied behind his back if ISTL decides that okay you want to pull out fine we'll start everything there's nothing Nigerian government can actually do the database is fully vested in ISTL and worse than that the there's a government seal which essentially makes a and in Nigerian E-passport valid right and the control of that seal is with ISTL it's again not with the immigration service so ISTL has the power to essentially create if a Nigerian citizen out of thin air and I have a very big problem with that because essentially what that means is that this company which is run by a drug trafficker who used to use is the problematic status to traffic you know drugs across borders into jurisdictions like the US now has the power to create passports to create Nigerian citizens so it doesn't take much imagination to think about the implications of that so what what has this power been used to do over the past you know 15 years that we are not aware of you know I obviously don't want to speculate on national TV but it doesn't take you it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where to see where my line of inquiry is headed and then the Malaysian company that prints these booklets irish corp has actually the executive the executive leadership of that company specifically the the CEO has been arrested as recently as 2017 on corruption charges in Malaysia with regard to the bidding process for the passport contract by Guinea the West African hundred Guinea so essentially you have this Malaysian company which has been implicated even by its own government for corrupt dealings with regards to how it obtained the passport contract 20 passports for Guinea that that company has the soul you know this the soul ability to print passport booklets for Nigerians right and then this company is a subcontractor working on behalf of I still so I still so contract printing which it was awarded to this Malaysian company and then to to get that done I still have to pay the Malaysian company in USD in hard currency right now it just so happens that obviously since 2016 the value of an era has more than half in relation to be to the US dollar so it has made being I still twice twice as expensive as it used to be so essentially and the the income that I still relies on which obviously comes from Nigerians apply passports comes in Naira so in in Naira terms it's income has remained roughly the same in dollar terms it's income has more than as as you know has half basically so it can't afford to pay for for printing of as many booklets as it used to so now the fight is with the CBN that CBN should provide Forex to I still at the CBN rates at the subsidized CBN rates and the CBN says no no way we're not going to do that that's a CBN under the Godwin MFLE and so I still is forced to source for Forex from the parallel markets which as we know is you know touching six hundred and actually dollar now so what that means is that it's almost impossible for you know given its current Naira income which hasn't changed almost impossible for there to be sufficient passport booklets for Nigerians because it has to pay the Malaysia company USD now my question is the security printing process yes we know that these materials these security printing materials are not produced in Nigeria currently we know that the technology to produce these booklets in Nigeria currently doesn't exist in Nigeria but given that this this is an administration which has paid so much lip service to local production and you know easing pressure on on on Forex demand by by impulse substitution all these kinds of things so shouldn't they have been some kind of a move to obtain that technology and to make it possible to print these booklets in Nigeria because even from a national security point of view I find it very hard to accept that a country of you know allegedly 180 or 200 million people has to you know contract the printing of passport booklets for citizens. It's a foreign company or country. Indeed David today we do understand that well we'll dig more into this and find out you know in in future what exactly the government of Nigeria is saying if they can justify contracting this to a company that has now that is now facing corruption charges in Malaysia and how Mr Fisher you know scale through the cracks to make it to such a sensitive position in the country. We'll be following up with you for more details David today thank you very much for joining us on the breakfast. Thank you for having me. Next stop we're talking about the North rejection of the power shifts for 2023 and their stance on the VAT controversy after the break.