The Registrar-General’s office says that approximately 100,000 passports remain uncollected, and they encourage applicants to visit their offices to collect the documents.
In an interview with the Sunday News, Registrar-General Henry Machiri said some of the uncollected passports were processed a long time ago and they suspect the applicants have died.
Machiri also attributed the non-collection to slight delays in processing the e-passports which may have made applicants believe the documents will not be processed. He said:
We managed to clear our backlog in September 2022 and all is well, we will never have a backlog again. We have said to those that we managed to clear when we had a backlog, come and collect your passports. Some have been collected but a number have not yet been collected.
E-Passports that have been enrolled are 1 111 625, e-passports collected/issued are 1 052 169 and the total number of uncollected machine-readable passports is 96 725.
We are encouraging people to go to the offices where they submitted their applications and collect them from there. If you applied in Bulawayo go there and collect your passport.
Machiri also said that the Registrar-General’s office has been notifying applicants that their passports are now ready for collection via text messages. He said:
We are also trying to devise other ways of informing those who will have applied for passports that their passports are ready for collection.
We have been sending them text messages when the passport is out but one might have changed the number as they wait so we will make other plans.
Other uncollected passports are due to unfortunate events such as death. So the system we use will inform us of those who will have died while they waited to collect their documents.
We do not have these statistics readily of the deceased but we can access them.
The Registrar-General revealed that an e-passport office at Gokwe Centre will be operational before the end of this month, while plans are underway to commence issuing e-passports at the Johannesburg office.
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