Nigeria border technology

ePassports and the ICAO PKD

The ICAO participant list gives 13 April 2009 for Nigeria. It is the earliest date for any African state on the list, read on 24 October 2026 ¹. PKD membership lets a state share and download the certificates used to check ePassport chips.

MIDAS at airports and land borders

In December 2020 IOM and Canada handed MIDAS equipment to the NIS for the Abuja and Lagos airports. The package covered 56 processing points, with 56 desktop computers and 50 sets of fingerprint scanners, passport readers and webcams. The project was funded by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada ².

IOM said MIDAS checks entry and exit data against national and international watchlists, including INTERPOL's, and synchronises data between the airports and NIS headquarters in Abuja. It said Nigeria has the largest and most complex MIDAS deployment worldwide ².

At land borders, a 2017 IOM presentation said a solar-powered MIDAS at Jibya on the Niger border created about 16,750 records in 18 weeks, with EU funding. At Mfum on the Cameroon border, a fraudulent ePassport was detected within two weeks of going online ³.

E-gates

On 23 June 2024 Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo said the eight e-gates at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja were 100% complete and would be commissioned by the President. The plan listed 21 gates for Lagos and four each for Kano, Enugu and Port Harcourt, as reported by Nairametrics ⁴.

At a later inspection in Lagos the minister said the gates were in user acceptance testing and use iris, fingerprint or facial scanning, as reported by Chinedu Eze for Arise News. He said a federal data centre lets the NIS hold its own biometric data rather than rely on a private company ⁵.

Neither report names the gate supplier or the cost ^4,5.

E-visa and landing card

• Announced: on 22 January 2025 the Interior Minister said all visa applications would be online by 1 March 2025, as reported by BusinessDay ⁸.
• Live: the NIS said the e-visa and an automated landing and exit card took effect on 1 May 2025 and visa on arrival ended that day ^6,7.
• Processing: approvals are expected within 48 hours and the e-visa cannot be extended ⁷.
• Penalties: overstay fines of US$15 a day from 1 September 2025, with longer bans for long overstays ⁶.
• Non-Nigerian inbound passengers must complete the online landing card before boarding ⁷.

Data centre and BCIMS

In January 2025 the Interior Minister described an 8.3-petabyte data centre at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Technology Innovation Complex at NIS headquarters in Sauka, Abuja, as reported by BusinessDay ⁸.

The NIS reported that it trained 87 personnel on a Border Control and Immigration Management System (BCIMS) at its headquarters. The undated notice does not say who built the system or where it is deployed ⁹.