15 December 2021
Shamila N Mdlongwa
In April of 2012 the then President, the late Robert Mugabe, introduced the E-passport.
Mugabe commissioned the E-passport center in 2012 alongside his vice Presidents Emmerson Mnangagwa and Phekekezela Mphoko.
The commissioned machine was to print 16,000 booklets per day to reduce backlog and eliminate long queues and sleeping overnight of people at the Registrar’s General’s offices to get a passport and creating a robust standard level of travel documents and for international security.
At the commissioning Mugabe said:
“We are happy as a country to be among pioneers of e-passport production.”
What happened to the e-passports then?
What happened to the machine that was to print 16 000 booklets per day?
Why are they still long queues and people sleeping outside the General Registrar Offices?
It has been 9 years since the e-passport printing press was first commissioned.
Yesterday the current President of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Dambuzo Mnangagwa again launched the e-passports for the same reasons Mugabe had.
A Statutory Instrument gazzeted yesterday states that,
“… the current type of passports issued before the date of opening these new regulations will cease to be accepted internationally by 31st December 2023 and will therefore need to be replaced by e-passport in terms of these regulations.”
Save for the Statutory Instrument there has not been any official communications from relevant ministry as to what is expected of the ‘new’ e-passport.
There is no detail of the kind of passport that will be issued, its features or general look.
The United Nations special agency on aviation security and standards, International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), recommended to member states procedures to assume that safeguard the integrity and security of travel and identity documents.
As is the norm, like everything else in Zimbabwe, the e-passport comes expensive and will be priced in the United States dollar currency, when we have our strong “Zimbabwean dollars.”
It has been gazzeted to cost US$120.00 for ordinary and US$220.00 for emergency.
Across the Zambezi River, the Zambian passport only costs USD$21 and takes 21 days to be processed whilst in Zimbabwe for an ordinary passport one can wait for over a year or more and the current pricing is as high as US$318,00.
Meanwhile there is confusion countrywide with regards to whether new passports will be issued upon renewal of expired ones like what the Ministry of Home Affairs has stated or whether everyone will be required to get an e-passport regardless of when their passport is expiring by December 2023 or not.
The Statutory Instrument states that the current passports issued before the date of operation of these regulations, will cease to be acceptable internationally by December 31, 2023, and will therefore need to be replaced by e-passports.
What is it that the Mnangagwa regime can do differently that Mugabe failed to do with the e-passports?