Passports to be replaced?

According to the Network Herald, Ghanaians may be called upon to surrender their current passports for new ones soon. This is because a new procedure for the acquisition of Ghanaian passports will be unveiled by the middle of July this year.

The rationale is to demystify the ?all important ? status of passports in Ghana by streamlining the process of acquisition while withdrawing all the documents that have fallen into the hands of suspicious foreigners. Sources at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hinted the Network Herald that already, all is in place to revert to the old order of purchasing the forms from any

Post Office in the country, processing everything there at the post office including the fifty thousand cedis deposit and then that is it.

The prospective applicant then goes to the Immigration Service only for the collection of the passport. That is the only time a prospective passport applicant interacts with officials at the Immigration Office.

To that effect, authorities are therefore working frantically at designating three out of the five days for the collection and processing of the documents from the post offices and two days for issuing out ready passports at the offices of the Immigration Service.

This has become necessary as a result of the apparent trauma Ghanaians are made to go through before acquiring passports. Even though the Ministry of Foreign Affairs promised early this year that procedures have been put in place for a prospective applicant to secure a passport within four weeks, it still takes over six months for an applicant to secure the travel document. And that sometimes depend on how lucky the applicant is.

Currently the passport office is grappling with an unseen ?Mafia? whose age-old livelihood seem to hinge on creating artificial bottle-necks in order to survive, but sources at the passport secretariat who themselves are diplomats assured our reporter that their backs will be broken soon.

To address the issue of non-Ghanaians securing Ghanaian passports with ease, a top government official indicated that the new procedure may coincide with the issuance of national identity cards which will officially designate the nationality of the applicant.

Also, only one uniform birth certificate will be entertained to cut out all the many dubious certificates that different shades of ?contractors? give out to accomplices at high fees.