By Abubakari Seidu Ajarfor
The Director of Passport, Dr. Alexander Grant Ntrakwa has assured that the hustle and bustle for a Ghanaian passport shall be a thing of the past.
He said this when he hinted the Punch that the passport division which is under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, in a very little time will migrate to electronic-passport on its website which is still under construction.
According to him, the passport office currently prints 2000 copies a day following the installation of new printers after he assumed into office on 25th August 2015.
?On 16th May, 2015, we installed two new printers that could print 1000 passport each a day. So now we are capable of printing 2000 passports a day, we printing have no problem with the printing but there are other issues we are dealing with and I can assure you that all this hustle and bustle will be over,? he stated.
The passport office has been in the media for several bad reasons of allegations of bribes, massive extortions, illegal middlemen [goro boys], rent-seeking behavior, harassment of applicants by officials, distortion of collection dates and among others.
Mr. Alexander has allayed such reports blaming it on Ghanaians as they deliberately refused to follow the normal procedure and rather refer to explore other options which mostly compounding to the problems of unfair service delivery.
In an interview with the Punch, the Passport Director said their major challenges ?is what Ghanaians are taking them through- the pressure and influx at the passport office which is prohibited.?
According to him, Ghanaians are not providing them the atmosphere to work efficiently for them.
He indicated that measures have been put up to address the series of challenges both workers and applicants went through.
?Very soon we are going to go online and then people will go and buy their forms online and designated banks will be available for payments either through their ATM online or cash with codes given to them after payments,? he noted.
He explained that applicants will receive appointment date upon payment of the bank charges and will be required to come for further processing which takes only three days for the passports to be processed and issued.
According to him, the online pilot project has been done already on 17th of December 2014 where six person registered and their passports were collected after 3 days.
He said the payment platform has delayed the project however they are currently holding series of meetings with some of the banks.
The Passport Director added that the initiative is part of the e-government project designed by NITA.
He warned that applicants should not payment more than GHc50 [normal price] for a passport form which last for 21 days and GHc100 [express] for only 9 days.
According to him, ?if you pay anything more than that then you are dealing with an agent. We are not supposed to collect money. No staff of the passport office is supposed to collect any money from any applicant with the view of helping or on behalf of the government of Ghana.?
He pointed out that any applicant who indulges in such indiscipline act is doing so at his/her own risk because no staff can influence the process.
Mr. Alexander noted that steps are taken to provide tags for staff members and officials for easy identification in order to minimize the reports of extortions and brides collected by staffs to influence the process.
He therefore urged applicants to report officials, with the help of the tags for query and reprimand.
The Passport Director has advised applicants to desist from engaging goro boys whom sometimes provides wrong information about the applicant just to speed up the processing.
According to him, it is in the interest of Ghanaians to fill their own forms, submit and follow up for the processing in order to avoid being caught up somewhere – a major reason many are refused visa due to wrong information filled by goro boys.
