Blantyre yet to start printing of passports
The Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services says it is yet to start printing passports at its headquarters in Blantyre.
In an interview yesterday, Immigration national spokesperson Wellington Chiponde said the head office is only receiving passport applications and providing other services.
He said passport printing is only being done in Lilongwe while both Blantyre and Lilongwe are “processing” the travel documents. He added that Mzuzu will wait longer to resume the processes.
Said Chiponde: “[Besides Lilongwe] the approach is to start with Blantyre then we will go to Mzuzu office and finish with Mangochi. But we will make formal announcement when we are ready. For now, printing will only be done in Lilongwe.”
He said the passport printing capacity in Lilongwe is at between 800 and 1 000 copies a day, but could not indicate the passport backlog.
Chiponde is on record having said 25 714 passports had been issued as at June 30 2024.
The clarification comes a day after the department issued a statement on Tuesday notifying Malawians that it would resume passport services in Blantyre.
During a visit to the Immigration headquarters yesterday, it was observed that passport services were yet to resume as some sections, notably biometrics, were not operational.
Some applicants claimed that they came as early as 6am hoping to be assisted
In an interview, an applicant, Grasiyano Dzombe, expressed frustration with the slow pace.
He said he came back from South Africa in March last year just to renew his passport, but ended up losing his job due to the delay to renew his passport.
Minister of Homeland Security Ken ZikhaleNg’oma is on record as having said that the department was printing 500 passport booklets per day.
The bottlenecks in processing passports date back to December 2021 when government cancelled a $60.8 million (about K103.3 billion) Techno Brain contract due to alleged poor handling by the former governing Democratic Progressive Party administration.
In April this year, the government engaged E-Tech Systems, a Malawian firm, as the new passport system supplier.
