Staff will work night shifts to end passports crisis – official

The Directorate of Immigration Services has introduced a raft of measures to improve the processing of passports.

Beginning this week, staff will be increased, counters will be set aside for emergency cases, and day and night shifts will be introduced from Monday to Sunday.

The acting Director General of Immigration Services Evelyn Cheluget yesterday said applications will now be received from 7 am to 8.30 pm.

She revealed that other remedies will include acquiring new booklets and repairing and purchasing new machines that will allow for 24/7 passport printing.

Some officers will also be deployed abroad, she said.

Addressing immigration officers at Nyayo House, Cheluget expressed optimism that the changes will bolster the processing and issuance of travel documents and effectively address the delays.

“We are working hard, the passport section has been working on shifts, we have dedicated counters for urgent cases and all regional heads to boost staff in the urgent counters,” she said.

This comes amid a backlog that has raised questions about why the Immigration Department takes ages to process passports, a process that should take 10 to 15 days.

The Directorate of Immigration Services on Friday defended itself, noting that between July 13 and August 2023, Nyayo House printed 96,310 passports.

Out of these 53,750 were printed by personnel working the day shift, while the remaining 42,560 were processed during the night shifts.

Massive corruption

On August 24, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki attributed delays in the processing of passports to massive corruption at Nyayo House.

When he appeared before Parliament’s Regional Integration Committee, the CS said corrupt officials at the Directorate of Immigration were taking bribes for services offered at no cost.

“I have received credible intelligence that could suggest that part of our problem in the processing of passports is a corruption problem.

There are good officers who are there serving the country patriotically but there are others collecting bribes and harassing the people of Kenya to get services that they should be getting for free,” the CS told the committee.

Faulty printer

Kindiki, however, said efforts were underway to clean up the mess at the department, adding that if need be, Nyayo House would be sealed off and declared a crime scene.

“I will clean up Nyayo House once and for all. If need be we will seal off Nyayo House and declare it a scene of crime. It won’t be business as usual,” he vowed.

There have been rising complaints of delays in the processing of passports. The department recently attributed the backlog to a faulty printer.

The immigration department said in May that one of its machines that prints the 34, 50 and 66-page booklets had broken down, affecting many people seeking to travel abroad.

According to Kindiki, the Department of Immigration and Citizen Services processes approximately 5,000 passports daily and the passport backlog currently stands at 58,000.

Early this month, the Commission of Administrative Justice (CAJ), also known as the Ombudsman, said there had been complaints from members of the public on social media against the Department of Immigration and the e-citizen platform saying they had been issued passports that have fewer pages than the ones they had paid for.

When he appeared before the committee, CAJ vice chair Washington Sati said the Immigration Department did not have an internal policy or a procedure guiding and regulating issues that may arise out of passport processing such as editing and cancellation of applications, thereby giving immigration officials the leeway to resolve such issues arbitrarily.

“Investigations established that the Department of Immigration has no mechanism for automatically refunding excess payment occasioned by the issuance of passports with fewer pages than that applied for,” said Sati.