Kampala, (UG): The Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Control (DCI) has revealed that they are stuck with more than 40,000 passports unclaimed by the owners, while over 5,000 passports are also unprocessed over partial details.
“People take time to fill in the online details for acquiring the passports, they pay money in the bank and also come here for physical interviews. Afterwards, they do not come to claim these passports,” Mr Simon Peter Mundeyi, the Spokesperson for the Ministry of Internal Affairs says.
He adds; ” Our Kyambogo collection centre is full and we have nowhere to keep this huge number of unclaimed passports.”
According to Mr Mundeyi, the over 5000 unprocessed passports are mostly for children whose paternal details are missing due to conflicting information on the DCI system.
“We have noticed that women come here to process passports for their children but leave the section for the father’s details blank. For us, we cannot process a passport with partial details. We need the full details for both parents,” Mundeyi said.
“There are several reasons why women do not give details of their children’s fathers. Some of these reasons include incest.”
This publication understands that the DCI has this year recorded 52 cases where women have indicated that the fathers of their children were their relatives.
The other is that some women have relationships with more than one man and cannot conclude who is the exact father of their children while other women were left with fatherless children after several men subjected their children to DNA tests, especially this year.
Mundeyi also said that DCI has this year processed 320,000 passports for Ugandans, while a total of 323 illegal foreigners were deported back to their countries, most of them from Pakistan, India and Nigeria.
The Directorate has also revealed plans to open up the passport application and distribution centres in Jinja and Arua in 2024 to reduce the number of people travelling to Kampala.
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