More than 10,000 passports have been left uncollected by their respective owners at passport offices across the country.
With some printed as far back as 2013, the Passport head office in Accra alone has about 4,000 of them.
Director of Passports, Mr Emmanuel Enos who disclosed these during a media briefing on passport acquisition process in Accra, yesterday expressed worry that the passports have been abandoned.
“It is strange that people will go through the hustle to apply for the passports but do not come for them. Yet there is a misconception that it takes many months to acquire passports,” he said.
He said his outfit was compiling the list for publication so owners can come for them while investigation would be conducted to ascertain reasons for the failure of applicants to collect them.
For applicants who initiated the acquisition process but had not provided other information requested, Mr Enos said the passport processing system clears incomplete information after six month therefore applicants will have to re-start the process.
He said backlog of about 6,000 applications as of January 2017 had been cleared due to the purchases of new printers and said efforts were being made to make the processes faster.
On the recently introduced online application mode, he said up to about 300 applications were processed every day and passports ready in three days if all documents presented are verified.
He said there were plans to expand the services to the regions, indicating that office spaces had been made available by Regional Coordinating Councils ready for use.
On the operations of middle men popularly known as ‘goro boys”, he said his outfit was working in collaboration with other stakeholders to deal with them and advised the public against patronizing their services.
He also said plans were far advanced to open Passport Application Centres (PACs) in Cape coast, Wa, Bolgatanga, and Koforidua to reduce pressure on the other six regional capitals.
Source: Ghanaian Times
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i am one of them, i misplaced my chit and i was told that, my passport cannot be found. so we will wait for the publication to see if it will help us locate our passports.
Director of passport, what has misconception got to do with this? They are not coming for it because of the stress they have to pass through. Someone will wake up as early as 4am to come over but will be ignored and attend to someone who will pay 600Gh instead of the normal fee, see the number of people who stand at the outside of your office and how security will be treating them too like the passport is been given to them for free. So far as the person isnt given any extra money, your employees are not ready to attend to them so at the end of it even if they come to check if it is ready thy will still go through the same stress so they decide not to come for it again. Keep it till you are tired or share among your families till you improve your way of service you will always have a lot of passports kept
Did you say there is a misconception? May be you don't understand the word. The reality remains that people go through frustrations for months before getting a common passport, and you say there is a misconception. People are not coming for the passports because, you will tell them to come for their passports a month after they apply, and after four months or more of following up, the don't get them. Some even forfeit the very opportunity for which they applied for the passport. When the passports get ready after months of these frustrations, do you send them messages to come over and pick them up? Not everybody lives in Accra or Kumasi. So people cannot be making vain journeys to your office just for passport.Keep them, when they have need of them, they will come. Abufus3m aa kwaakwa.
They should use them themselves because the owners used different means to acquire one while delaying them because they don't pay money to them