The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Gabriel Aduda, has said that Nigeria will soon reopen its Consulate-General in San Francisco, United States, to provide consular services for the huge population of Nigerians residing on the West Coast of the US.
Ambassador Aduda, while speaking in New York, revealed that the plan to re-open the mission had reached “an advanced stage.”
The Federal Government shut down the San Francisco, California, Consulate- a five-room, 4,250-square foot property- in 1989.
Aduda said:
We think rather than having Nigerians residing in California travelling to the East Coast or to the North Coast, they don’t have to travel that far.
The mission (San Francisco) is very important and in the next few months, before the end of the year, the mission will be running.
The permanent secretary said that the ministry and members of the National Assembly committees on Foreign Affairs had visited all the Nigerian missions in the US in June for an on-the-spot assessment.
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He said:
We visited the Embassy in Washington, DC, the New York Mission, the Atlanta Mission and we took a trip to San Francisco where we hope to re-open another mission that will service the West Coast.
On the state of facilities in the Nigerian missions, Aduda said there was the need for the facilities to be maintained as some of them had been in existence for so long.
There is the need for upgrading, there is the need for routine maintenance and on the whole, service-wise, I think we were quite satisfied with what we saw at the missions.
You will see that there are changes in all the missions in the US, especially Atlanta and New York when it comes to the services that are being rendered to Nigerians.
This is because, during the visit, it gave us the opportunity to discuss with the staff of the missions the new direction that the Federal Government is aiming.
The permanent secretary said most of the challenges presented by the staff were immigration-related and they were already being addressed.
Aduda said Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) was totally responsible for producing passports and that the shortage of passport booklets was due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 slowed down a lot of things and we got a lot of backlogs, so the inability to meet up is what created the problem in offering passport service to Nigerians abroad.
The permanent secretary assured Nigerians living in the US of improved services on passport issuance.
