Ministry of Internal Affairs has announced that it is stuck with over 30,000 uncollected passports.
According to the ministry spokesperson, Simon Mundeyi, there are passports that have remained unclaimed for more than a year, and these will be destroyed.
“We request members of the public who applied for passports, paid, scheduled appointments, and had their passports made to come and pick them up. We now have about 30,000 passports in our stores in Kyambogo that have not been claimed by their owners,” Mundeyi said.
Mundeyi further noted that some applicants put in the wrong contacts while applying for passports, and when messages notifying them to pick up their documents are sent, they go to the wrong numbers.
Mundeyi also noted that after the system upgrade, which also included an Automatic Finger Integrated System (AFIS), they are now producing more passports than normal in a bid to help clear the backlog of unprinted passports.
“We are now producing 3000 passports daily yet normally, we produce 2000 passports and because of this we expect numbers to be a little high at the passport collection centre in Kyambogo,” he said.
He revealed that in a period of one or two weeks, they will have cleared the backlog and the printing of passports will return to normal.