Accra, May 7, - The Ministry of
Foreign Affairs will soon open five more passport application centres across
the country to ease the stress of acquiring the document.
The validity of the Ghanaian
passport, currently useable for only five years, would be extended to ten years
duration to conform to international practice and address the difficulties in
renewing or procuring the travel document, Foreign Affairs Minister Shirley
Ayorkor Botchway has stated.
Speaking to a cross section of
the media at the weekend after she called unannounced to the Passport Office to
apprise herself with the workings of the bureau, she disclosed that Tema,
Koforidua, Cape Coast, the Upper West and Upper East Regions would host the new
passport centres.
There are currently six
application centres across the country, with each having its peculiar
challenge, leading to undue delays in the acquisition of passports and
exploitation of applicants by middlemen. However, more Ghanaians are opting for
the online application service, which many say was making the process less
cumbersome.
Mrs Botchway who interacted with
both officials of the Office and with applicants was amazed that even with all
the interventions made by government to ease the process of obtaining a
passport, there were still unnecessary delays.
She was not happy when an
applicant disclosed that she had had to queue as early as 0100 hours to be able
to be among the 100 applicants the passport office processes daily.
The Minister also discovered in
her interaction with the applicants that some who had paid for expedited
processing, had had to wait months for a document that they should have gotten
in a fortnight.
To her chagrin, she learnt there
were claimants whose passports were ready but for some unexplained reason, the
documents had not been given to them, giving room for exploitation by middlemen
with the active collusion of officials.
At a point the Minister
intervened in three such cases, and to the surprise of her, the team from the
Ministry and the media, an applicant who had been asked on several occasion to come back at
other times, got his passport immediate delivered to him when the Minister
insisted to know why the delay in issuing the document.
The Minister later took two other
applicants who were asked to report in a fortnight to the Ridge offices of the
bureau, submitted their slips and instantaneously and right in the Minister’s
presence, their passports were printed, documented and presented to them.
The Minister reiterated
Governments resolve to ensure that the processes leading to passport
acquisition in the country was made easier.
She however expressed concern at
the frequency at which foreigners tried to acquire Ghanaian passports. The
Passport Office however has evolved stringent verification processes that made
it difficult for foreigners to outwit the system.
“This is an attestation to the
fact that we have an enviable reputation worldwide and people want to identify
with our country. But trying to acquire our passport when you are not a
Ghanaian is criminal and we would not treat this lying low,” she said.
She was confident that when fully
operational, the national identity card system, would address the issue of
foreigners acquiring Ghanaian passports.
GNA
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