The Nigeria Immigration Service on Wednesday raised the alarm that it had no money to pay their new recruits this year and said that it needed additional N4 billion to pay the wages of their new recruits.

The comptroller-general of immigration, Mr David Parradang, made these revelations yesterday when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Interior to defend its 2014 budget.

According to him, given that there was no budgetary provision for the new recruits it’s unrealistic to recruit 4, 000 new officers.

“We started the process of reconciliation when the board announced we got the approval to recruit 4, 000 and above, but there was no budgetary provisions for funding of that process,” Parradang said. “If we recruit the people, there will be no salaries for them; so we have approached the Budget Office. They said it was late and that it cannot make available that amount of money and we calculated that; but N4bn would be able to pay those officers that are expected to be recruited for the year 2014.”

He also added that they had to wait for the results of the IPs programme to see whether there will be savings because they don’t want to spend additional money on overhead.

The immigration boss also said the nation’s borders are too porous, hence the service needs additional funds to check the level of illegal immigrants into the country.