Immigration races to clear 1.7 million passport application

By Moses Muli

Published: 22 March 2024 3:21 PM(EAT)

The government is racing against time to process 1.724 million passports for Kenyans seeking to travel overseas.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki said majority of those seeking the passports are jobseekers travelling abroad in search of greener pastures.

He said the quest to seek jobs abroad had seen the backlog of passports rise from 200,000 to the current figure.

Appearing before the Regional Integration Committee, Kindiki admitted that the government had failed to meet its target of clearing the backlog due to reasons beyond its control.

“I regret to admit that we did not achieve the target we set as government in terms of cleaning up and issuing passports. Our initial commitment was complicated by new developments, some of which were beyond the control of the government,” he said.

The CS added: “Because of the aggressive Government programmes and people getting interested to travel, this has seen the backlog grow to beyond 200,000.”

Kindiki told MPs that the current challenges facing the printing of booklets will be addressed in the next 100 days.

He clarified that the government has been able to deal with the budgetary constraints that existed previously as the Immigration Department has been allowed to spend the Appropriations in Aid amounting to Sh3 billion.

“We are doing our best, we now have money and people to do the printing, but the magnitude of this mess can only be solved within a few months’ time.”

“Initially there was a serious budgetary constraint that made it impossible to meet the demands, but we have been able to deal with that,” he added.

The CS said that in the next one week, his office will strive to clear the long queues currently being witnessed at the Immigration Department headquarters at Nyayo House, Nairobi.

“It is very disrespectful to Kenyans to make them come and crowd at Nyayo House, we will find a way of stopping it by next week somehow….I am going to take over the public communications department and put it in my office until we deal with this matter,” stated Kindiki.

The CS, who had been invited by the MPs to shed light on the delays of the issuance of the passports, also disclosed that he has already requested the intervention of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to deal with vendor wars that could be derailing the procurement of the booklets used for printing of passports.

“I have assigned and sought the support of NIS to deal with the possibility of the vendor wars that could be surrounding this exercise,” he said.

Procurement team

And to further deal with the delays, he told MPs that in the next 10 days, the entire procurement team at the Immigration Department and police attached at Nyayo House will have been moved due alleged cases of corruption.

He also announced that they have prosecuted over 17 members of the staff who have allegedly been collecting bribes.

“We have prosecuted 17 members of our staff. It was so bad that one of them when he heard his name was there, he got a heart attack. They have been taking advantage of the situation to collect bribes,” said the CS.

While emphasizing that he will deal with the mess at the Immigration Department, he, however, explained that the current delay is because of lack raw materials from the suppliers.

He said they requested the supplier to print about three million booklets every 90 days to deal with the backlog, but the supplier insisted that they could only print 1.5 million booklets.

Kindiki claimed that the war in Ukraine war as well as other international issues that they had no control of derailed the process as they are not able to print the booklets with the speed the government wanted.
“There was a problem of the local supply chain in the manufacturing of the raw material used for the making of world class passports as approved by the civil aviation,” he said.

“I regret to admit that we did not achieve the target we set as government in terms of cleaning up and issuing passports” Kindiki said.