Africa-Press – Uganda. The Ministry of Internal Affairs has said the printing of passports has resumed at full capacity.
The ministry’s spokesperson, Mr Simon Peter Mundeyi, yesterday said since around May, they have been working at half capacity, producing about 1,000 passports a day.
However, Mr Mundeyi said they are now producing between 2,500 and 3,000 passports a day.
“The good news I have today is that we have resumed full scale passport processing. We have been having challenges where we were only dealing with emergencies of people going abroad for treatment, studies, and quick appointments,” he told journalists during a press briefing at police headquarters in Naguru, Kampala.
Mr Mundeyi added that they have also acquired enough passport booklets. However, he said they will first deal with backlog, which, he said, stands at about 90,000.
“We acknowledge the delays that many passport applicants had to endure in the recent past. We are working on ensuring normal service and request those who haven’t received their passports yet to be patient as we shall have cleared all the backlog by the end of the month,” he explained.
Backlog
“We have been having a backlog of about 90,000 applicants in the system and of course these included the express passports, we are going to clear all these,” he added.
Mr Mundeyi once against cautioned applicants against using brokers to get passports.
“We ask Ugandans who keep “donating” money to these brokers to please stop it. Even if you have a lot of money, it can be used in other things than donating free money to these brokers. Some of these individuals have already been arrested and we are on the lookout for others,” he said.
He also called upon members of the public that applied for the East African e-passports between 2019 and 2021 to pick them.
“Collection of passports in Kyambogo is ongoing; we have now more than 10,000 uncollected passports in our stores, before we had 50,000. I would like to thank the media for publicising this and most people have collected them,” Mr Mundeyi said.
The long delays
The revelation will come as a big relief to thousands of people who have been queuing at the passport collection centre in Kyambogo, Kampala, waiting for their passports.
Regulations governing the issuance of passports stipulate that express passports can be obtained in four days while ordinary passports take two weeks. However, this has not been the case, with some people saying they have been waiting for months to get their passports.
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