07 Mar 2023

The Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs is in the process of getting routers functional to facilitate the passport application process.

This was said by Assistant Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Mabuse Pule, when he was responding to a parliamentary question on Monday on behalf of labour and home affairs minister.

Mr Pule told Parliament that the ministry had not experienced problems with passport printing machines but experienced problems of failure to deliver on the initiative by two local companies which were contracted before.

“The ministry has since contracted the third local company which we believe will be able to deliver, gauging from our interactions with the company,” Mr Pule said.

On the other hand, he told Parliament that printing of passports was centralised at the headquarters only.

He further acknowledged that Mahalapye and Serowe immigration offices had not been processing applications for passports since 2019, something he attributed to unavailability of functional routers and not necessarily non-functionality of passport printing machines.

“My ministry has since awarded a contract on February 17 this year for the supply and installation of routers at immigration offices around the country and the contractor is expected to complete the work by end of next month and the situation will be back to normal by then,” he said.

Member of Parliament for Serowe South, Mr Baratiwa Mathoothe had asked the minister to explain how long the passport printing machines had been down.

MP Mathoothe also wanted to know when the tendering stage for those servers that were down would be completed and when the machines would be fully functional and the situation normalised. ENDS