adminZimbabwe has been lagging behind other countries in terms of aligning its operations at the passport office with the latest technological advancements but revelations by the co-Minister of Home Affairs Cde Kembo Mohadi indicate that the country is finally catching up. In the Sadc region, Botswana, South Africa and Namibia are some of the countries that have digitalised and technologically enhanced the operations of their passport offices, reducing turnaround time and improving the security features of their passports.
While Zimbabwe compares favourably with these countries in terms of cost of acquiring an ordinary passport, the time it actually takes to process it is still long. Government reduced the price of a standard passport from $140 to $50 in 2010 after an outcry.
A South African passport costs R400 and takes three weeks to produce while in Botswana the turnaround time is 14 days and the new e-passport costs P260. The Namibian passport takes about 4-8 weeks and costs N200 and the forms are available online. In an interview, Cde Mohadi told us that passport seekers would soon be able to download an application form online, complete it and take it to the passport office where they would pay application fees.
This will reduce time spent in queues and improve efficiency at that office. Getting a passport in Zimbabwe has over the years been a nightmarish ordeal as bureaucratic haggles, corruption and outright incompetence by some officers at the RG’s office had rendered the exercise a huge challenge. Tales of people sleeping in queues, touts taking advantage of the situation to charge people to jump queues and corrupt officials charging people exorbitant amounts of money to get passports have tarnished the image of the RG’s Office.
While queues have generally gone down and the turnaround time for an ordinary passport reduced from about three months to one month, people are still finding it hard to process their application forms because of a few bottlenecks that still exist. At the Bulawayo passport office for instance, syndicates that work in cahoots with some corrupt officials in that office, are still operational.
They deliberately make it difficult for people to access the office to lay the groundwork for their underhand deals. We implore authorities to crack down on this practice. In the same vein, we commend Government for responding to the plight of long suffering ordinary people and digitalising the RG’s Office.
According to Minister Mohadi, they had managed to get more printers for the passport office and staff was working overtime to clear the backlog. He said although the new system might sound ambitious because most people do not have access to computers, the development would be handy especially for urban passport seekers. “This is a positive development for urban passport seekers and those with computers who can access the document online. Very soon there will be no need to queue at the Registrar General’s offices. As long as the headquarters is connected, that means all offices countrywide will have the facility,” Minister Mohadi said.
We envisage a situation where the new system will speed up the operations of the RG’s Office and see more passports being processed daily. We hope this will in turn translate into a further reduction in the cost of a standard passport in future as volumes increase.
The new system will not only see Zimbabwe improving the operations of the RG’s Office but the country will also comply with international standards prescribed by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
Online Reporter