…as govt secures only 30 percent of needed passports
Mathatisi Sebusi
THE Ministry of Local Government, Chieftainship, Home Affairs and Police will only be able to secure 60 000 of the 200 000 passports needed by Basotho.
This was revealed before parliament’s portfolio cluster Committee on Law and Public Safety while it was grilling Local Government, Chieftainship, Home Affairs and Police Minister, Lebona Lephema, and his team on Tuesday.
Mr Lephema said their budget would only allow them to procure 60 000 passports whereas they were faced with a 200 000 national demand.
He said his ministry had been faced with a challenge of securing passports from their foreign supplier. This had led to Basotho struggling to get passports since August last year.
Even though he said they would finally be able to issue passports to Basotho, his ministry will not be able to procure the 200 000 passports citizens required due to financial constraints.
The committee said it was only fair for the ministry to refund Basotho the M630s they had each paid when applying for emergency passports which had not been produced timeously.
In normal times, an emergency passport applicant pays M630 to get a passport the same day or the following day. However, that has not been the case as people had waited for months to get their emergency passports, while others were still waiting despite having paid that amount.
The committee therefore found the ministry at fault because the applicants could have paid the normal M130 passport fee, instead of the emergency charge.
Again under regular practise, this normal passport should be issued within a week or two weeks at most. However, there has been a problem of passports issuance since August last year.
Emergency passports are issued to students, workers, patients or people who have to be in other countries urgently.
Mr Lephema’s ministry was also ordered to present a list of people who had applied for the emergency passports but never received them on time and the amount of money which the ministry had collected as a result.
“What is your plan with the money you took from people who applied for emergency passports but never got them on time. Are you planning to refund them? Let us not shy away from this problem, we need to resolve it. Basotho deserve justice,” said one of the committee members, Machesetsa Mofomobe.
Mr Lephema’s reply was that he did not have those statistics readily available.
However, he admitted that there were Basotho who had paid M630 for emergency passports but never received them on time. He said urgent applications were accepted with the hope that their supplier would deliver passports on time.
“This is a challenging situation… I will go back and find out the number of urgent passport applicants who did not receive their passports on time and get advice on how we can resolve the matter. I understand that Basotho deserve justice and going forward, I will direct my team to never issue urgent passports when we do not have sufficient stock,” Mr Lephema said.
Mr Lephema told the committee that the ministry encountered some challenges with their supplier but said the challenges had been resolved as of current.
For his part, the Director of Passports, Mpiko Rafono, told the committee that the ministry would only be able to procure 60 000 passports for this financial year 2024/25, which he said they had already ordered.
He said they had a stock of 47 000 passports which were being issued to Basotho with first preference being given to 2022 applicants.
Mr Rafono also stated that the ministry was faced with 47 034 new passport applications.
“Apart from this number, an additional 73 000 applicants might need passports this year as they applied 10 years ago and their passports have expired or will expire this financial year,” Mr Rafono said.
The committee asked if there was a strategy in place to ensure that all Basotho get passports, especially those that the ministry had been aware they would need to renew their passports this year.
The ministry did not present any strategy, but instead, there were inconsistencies in their answers which then angered the committee’s chairperson, Mokoena Ramakatasa, who accused the ministry of misleading the committee.
Mr Rafono had said the procurement of more passports had been made while the ministry’s Principal Secretary, Mamphaka Mabesa, told the committee that there were no arrangements made as yet to address the matter.
Mr Ramakatsa was irked, stating that this was not the first time the committee was misled by the ministry. He said on previous communications, the ministry claimed that the problem behind passport issuance was the supplier, but now they were claiming it was money.
“This shows that there is a lot of miscommunications within the ministry, and as a result you mislead this committee. Go back and seek answers and we will continue with this conversation some other time maybe next week,” he said.
