We are On Course to Fix the Passport Application Mess, PS Bitok Tells Diaspora Affairs Committee
The Principal Secretary State Department for Immigration and Citizen Services has told legislators that in three months time, passport applications will take a maximum of seven days to process.
Speaking when he appeared before the Committee on Diaspora Affairs and Migrant Workers, PS Amb. (Prof.) Julius Bitok told the Committee that the untold suffering that Kenyans among them migrant workers have been going through due to delays in processing passport applications, will soon be a thing of the past after the Department receives new printers due in two months time.
“Hon. Members our printers broke down a while ago but we are happy that the National Assembly approved a budgetary allocation for new printers. Currently, we’re only able to print 1,500 passports against a daily demand of 4,500 passports”, he told the Members.
“We have now made an order for two printers which should be here in two months time. Once we receive them, together with the current two which are operational, we shall boost our capacity to print 6,000 passports. It should therefore not take more than seven days to process any application”, he assured the legislators
The PS had been invited by the Committee to apprise them on the measures they have put in place to ease the facilitation of Kenyan migrant workers with passports. The Committee had also sought to know the plans by the State Department to ensure Kenyans in the Diaspora are facilitated with passports and civil registration documents efficiently and timely.
In response, the PS told the Committee that the State Department was working closely with the Association of Private Employment in Kenya (ASMAK) and the Kenya Association of Private Employment Agencies( KAPEA) in ensuring that migrant workers are facilitated to get passports.
The MPs also heard that officers from the Department had been deployed to operate mobile application kits in Doha, Stockholm, Tokyo, New Delhi, Riyadh, New York, Pretoria and London Missions as a stop-gap measure.
However, Members led by the Chairperson, Hon. Haika Mizighi expressed concerns over complaints that some applicants who had applied for a 66-page passport book had since been told to revise their applications to the smaller 32- page booklet. Members noted that the shortage had led to some immigration officials defrauding Kenyans who wanted their applications expedited.
The PS explained that at the twilight of the last regime, the PS in charge of immigration then delayed to approve a tender for processing the 66-page passport book, resulting to a shortage of the booklet. The Department had been left with no choice but to ask applicants to revise their applications to apply for the smaller booklet, a move that he admitted angered many applicants.
He revealed that going forward, in a bid to engance the ease of processing the applications, the government had resulted to a one size for all; a 50-page passport booklet.
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