The Media Rights Agenda has named the Nigerian Immigration Service as the new inductee into its ‘FOI hall of shame’.

MRA’s freedom of information programme manager, Ridwan Sulaiman stated this in a statement on Monday September 18, 2017.

He said, “The management of the Nigeria Immigration Service, an institution whose questionable recruitment process led to an avoidable tragedy in March 2014, should be eager to do more to ensure transparency and accountability in the institution rather than shrouding its activities in secrecy. Such an institution should make the extra effort to provide the public with information on its activities and operations, especially as it is required by law and in the face of its involvement in a tragedy arising from allegations of job racketeering and fraud, which led to arrests, dismissals and court cases.”

Continuing he said, “In the six years since the enactment of the FOI Act, the immigration service has not submitted any annual report to the attorney-general of the federation as required by section 29(1) of the act. The institution’s failure to submit its annual reports to the attorney-general of the federation does it no good. Besides being a violation of the law in itself, this also makes it difficult to ascertain how responsive the institution has been to requests for information from members of the public.

“These reports would have provided the relevant information about the number of applications for information that it has received annually over the last six years and the number of such applications that it processed, granted or refused, alongside other details that it is required by the act to provide in its report to the attorney-general. Instead, there is no information available on its handling of FOI requests including those sent to it in the wake of the aforementioned tragedy.”

Also, there is no indication that the immigration service has provided the required training for its officials on the public right of access to information at any time in the last six years.

The MRA FOI Hall of Shame “award” was launched in July 2017 to draw attention to public officials and institutions that are undermining the effectiveness of the Freedom of Information Act, 2011 through their actions, inactions, utterances and decisions.

The Nigerian Immigration Service is the 11th inductee of the MRA FOI Hall of Shame award.