Internal Affairs has over 30,000 unclaimed passports, threatens to destroy them

The ministry spokesperson, Simon Mundeyi, said some of these unclaimed passports have been at the ministry for more than one year and so his office may be forced to burn them.

“We request members of the public who applied for passports, paid, scheduled appointments and their passports made to come and pick them. We now have about 30,000 passports in our stores in Kyambogo which have not been claimed by owners,” Mundeyi said.

“The ministry is therefore planning to destroy passports which have taken a year in store because we don’t have where to keep them.”

In the past, Mundeyi said, the ministry advertised in various media calling upon the persons concerned to collect their passports, but nobody showed up.

He however conceded that this could be because many applicants put the wrong contacts on their details while applying for passports and so informational lines were crossed when they were notified to collect their passport.

“Some people during the process of applying online made mistakes in the contacts they put. If you miss number or something, the message will go to a different person. We appeal to all Ugandans who applied for passports to come to Kyambogo to check our centre because we are soon going to destroy them,” he said.

Mundeyi added that after the system upgrade, inclusive of an Automatic Finger Integrated System (AFIS), the ministry is producing more passport than usual as they attempt to clear the backlog of unprinted passports.

“We are now producing 3000 passports daily yet normally, we produce 2000 passports and because of this we expect numbers to be a little high at the passport collection centre in Kyambogo.”

He noted that in a period of one or two weeks, they will have cleared the backlog and the printing of passports will return to normal.