The Ministry of Internal Affairs has decried the increased daily enrollment rates for people seeking passports in Uganda. Currently, Passports are issued in two days for express applicants and not more than four days for normal applicants.
The increased demand is attributed to the need to replace the old Passport with the Electronic Passport as a deadline for validity of the old Passport which was 31st January 2021 and has been extended to 4th April 2022 and Ugandans are opting to take up employment in Arab countries.
According to Dr. Benon Mutambi, the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the shooting numbers of people seeking passports has brought too much pressure on the service providers. He said they used to receive 1000 applications daily to their dismay; the numbers have doubled to 2100 Passports daily.
“To match the 2100 applications received daily, and the entire production line leading to Passport issuance has been doubled to enable production and issuance of at least 2000 Passports daily,” he said.
In tandem, the Ministry is set to operationalize Kampala Regional Office which will be a Passport Collection Centre to ease the congestion problem currently being experienced at the Ministry Headquarters. The Ministry Headquarters will be preserved for only those seeking to be enrolled for issuance of Passports.
He said procurement is in progress to increase equipment infrastructure capacity that will match the projected demand rates especially as they near the new deadline for the old Machine Readable Passport that we communicated to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Passport enrolment services have been decentralized to regional centres to ease service delivery. On the 29th March 2021, Mbarara Regional Immigration Office operationalized the Passport enrolment system and its operations are being ramped up to ease the pressure at the Ministry headquarters. Mbale and Gulu will be operational by the end of May and June 2021 respectively.
The ministry is currently offering e-Immigration services to facilitate the application of various immigration services which include; Visas, Work Permits and Passes, Certificates of Residence, grant of Uganda Citizenship and border management services.
The e-Immigration system is currently deployed at our Regions of Mbarara, Jinja, Mbale, Gulu, Uganda Missions abroad including Washington, London, Ottawa, Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen, Canberra, Ankara, Beijing, Berlin, Mogadishu, Pretoria, Abuja, New Delhi, Guangzhou and Riyadh.
