By Patricia Mollyne Mataga
You will soon get a new passport within 21 days of your new application, the government has announced.
Interior and National Administration Cabinet Secretary Prof Kithure Kindiki says quick processing of the passports is one of the reforms he has been pushing for.
In a statement on Monday, the CS also announced that the waiting period will be reduced to just three days by the end of the year.
“Going forward, all new applicants will receive their passports within 21 days from the date of application, while urgent cases will receive theirs immediately,” the CS said.
“Effective August 1, 2024, the waiting period will be reduced to 7 days and further to 3 days effective November 1, 2024,” he added.
Cleaning the mess at the Immigration Department has been a top priority for Kindiki since he was appointed a Cabinet Secretary.
He has made several impromptu visits to Nyayo House, the department’s headquarters in Nairobi.
The visits, Kindiki notes, have finally bore fruits with most of the passports that had taken years to be processed already picked.
“All 724,000 passports that were part of the historical backlog that had accumulated between June 2021 and March 2024 have now been printed, and 684,500 of them already collected by their holders,” the CS said.
However, he admitted that it took longer than expected to fix the issue as it needed time to get exchequer funding, pay pending supplier debts, dismantle the corruption cartels, and acquire and install modern, high capacity printing equipment.
With most of the pressing issues at the Nyayo House now a thing of the past, the soft-spoken but firm CS says “What remains now is to fastrack the collection of 39,500 ready but uncollected passports from the backlog lot.
“Sustaining the production and delivery systems to ensure that the reform program prevails in the long term and creating system efficiency in the archival, record management, registry and Information Technology management are another areas Kindiki hopes will be fixed.