A fee question the High Commission says it's already answered.

If you're in Cardiff or Aberdeen and you've been putting off your passport renewal, the window is nearly gone. The Nigeria Immigration Service, working with the High Commission in London, is running intervention sessions in both cities through September 26. That's two more days after today. After that, London. Through October 3, at 56-57 Fleet Street.

Bring the old booklet. Any renewal, reissue, or change of data needs it. The standard administrative charge is £20, paid by postal order or e-payment made out to the High Commission. Lost, misplaced or damaged passports carry a separate £150 charge, since those applications need extra verification the standard renewal doesn't.

The High Commission has had to publicly deny a different figure circulating online, a claim that a £70 fee received presidential approval. Its position, stated more than once now, is that £20 is the approved standard charge. It hasn't specified exactly where the £70 figure came from, only that it doesn't reflect the Commission's actual position.

That the Commission has had to repeat itself says something about how far a wrong number can travel before the real one catches up. Passport intervention exercises like this one run on tight, fixed windows, a city gets its days, then the exercise moves on. Someone who shows up in Cardiff on the wrong fee, without the right amount in hand, doesn't get a second attempt there. The next stop is London, three hundred kilometres away, running for a wider window but with its own crowds and its own queue.

For someone in Cardiff or Aberdeen with two days left, the safest number to carry into the venue is the one the Commission itself has now confirmed twice. £20 for a standard application, old booklet in hand. £150 if the passport is lost or damaged. Anything else circulating is the thing the Commission is actively asking people to stop believing.

This isn't the first time a Nigerian diaspora service abroad has had to fight its own paperwork's reputation. Intervention exercises like this one exist precisely because the standard consular route, mailing documents to a High Commission and waiting, has historically taken long enough that people started showing up in person instead, trading a wait for a queue. The exercise works when the information travelling ahead of it is accurate. When it isn't, the queue gets longer for the same reason the wait used to, people arriving with the wrong expectation and needing to be sorted out before anyone can be processed. Two days left in these two cities isn't much room for that kind of correction.