The Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services has disclosed that its efforts to resume printing of passports have been successful, with the newly acquired machine printing more passports per day.
This contradicts social media reports some quarters of the society have been circulating that the system remains hacked.
The department’s spokesperson, Wellington Chiponde, said it is not true that the system had been tampered again.
“We are printing the passports. Of course, we are not receiving new applications because we are waiting for the parliament to gazette the new price of K50, 000 before accepting new applicants,” said Chiponde.
On February 29, 2024, President Dr. Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera gave the department a 21-day ultimatum to restore the system and resume the printing of passports.
Chakwera said he was concerned with the suffering Malawians were being subjected to due to long wait for the travel documents.
He said as a caring leader, he would not allow his people to continue suffering to get passports when the country has plenty of ICT technocrats.
And before the expiry of the 21 days, the department announced that it had restored the system and that printing of the passports had started.
In an interview on Saturday, Chiponde, maintained that the printing of the passports is going on very well.
Chiponde also reminded Malawians that fees for the e-passports have been reduced by 55%.
According to a statement the Director General, Brigadier General Charles Kalumo, released on Wednesday, issuance of the e-Passport Issuance Services resumed gradually in Lilongwe before expanding the services to other regions.
Kalumo had stated that the Chakwera-led government has reduced the e-Passport fee by 55 percent for local Malawians, from K90, 000 to K50, 000, for ordinary passports with waiting processing time of 10 days when the system is fully calibrated and operating optimally.
“More details will be announced soon when the Honourable Ministers of Homeland Security and Information hold a press conference,” read the DG’s announcement.
Kalumo thanked Malawians for exercising patience during the time the e-passport issuance system was being fixed by a team of local experts from various entities who ‘worked around the clock to complete the task within the timeframe set by His Excellency the President’.
But it would appear that this did not please some quarters of the society, especially the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) zealots, who had been spreading fake news that the system was down again.
DPP is not happy with the department’s termination of the contract with Techno Brain where it used to get US$10 from the US$90 the company was getting from the deal.
The termination of the contract, thus, meant that the former governing party had lost its source of revenue.
It is probably against this background that DPP zealots have been writing and posting fake news about the department and its services since the party lost power in the Fresh Presidential Elections in June 2020.
