Waiting for a Nigerian passport became more than an administrative delay; it was visible as a line at passport offices. A 2023 field report described applicants at the Makurdi office waiting in turn to collect passport booklets and recorded crowds of applicants at Ikeja in Lagos. In the same year, the interior minister publicly instructed immigration officials to end the situation in which Nigerians queued endlessly to apply for or collect passports. The language referred to specific stages of the passport process, not to an abstract backlog. Nigeria’s official procedure now begins online, but applicants still have to appear for biometric enrolment. That combination explains why digitisation alone may not remove the physical wait: identity checks and collection remain tied to staffed locations, and a queue reappears when capacity falls behind demand. A delayed document is converted into hours of embodied waiting, with costs in travel, work and uncertainty. The case is especially revealing because the government itself identified the application-and-collection queue as a problem requiring reform.