By Patricia Mollyne Mataga
Normal operations for the issuance of passports at the Immigration Department have resumed.
The operations were halted earlier this week following what the department said was a system failure.
But on Thursday, the government said it was now back to normal and thanked Kenyans who might have been affected by the issue for their patience.
“We are pleased to inform all our clients that we have resumed normal operations in the issuance of passports. We thank you for your patience and understanding during the period that we experienced a downtime,” the department said in an update on its social media pages.
On Tuesday, the processing of passports was stopped after machines at Nyayo House reported a downtime.
The issue affected both application receiving and collection services.
“Our engineers are working to resolve the issue and ensure the resumption of normal services as soon as possible,” the Ministry of Immigration said.
The disruption had threatened to take back progress made to address the backlog of passport applications.
At least 500,000 applications had been affected by the downtime.
There were fears the backlog would move to over 1 million from 700,000 with the latest technical hitch in the processing of the key document that many seeking to travel outside the country require.
Streamlining passport services has been one of the key priority areas for the Interior and National Administration Cabinet Secretary Prof Kithure Kindiki.
The government recently purchased two new passport printing machines and facilitated the acquisition of adequate printing equipment. This was aimed at easing the processing of travel the key travel documents and ending delays.
“There are now sufficient stocks of passport booklets and new modern high-capacity printers have been acquired for personalization of passport details. A program is in place for sustaining the reforms in the long run, including ensuring that the Immigration Directorate remains a corruption-free environment,” CS Kindiki said on April 30, 2024.