The Ministry of Internal Affairs has revealed that shockingly, 97% of Ugandans don’t own passports .
Addressing journalists on Monday, the Ministry of Internal Affairs spokesperson, Simon Mundeyi said since 2018 when the country started issuing electronic passports, only 1.3 million of Ugandans have applied for passports.
“Only 1.3 million Ugandans owned either paper based or polycarbonate passports. This means over 43 million Ugandans don’t have passports,” Mundeyi said .
Uganda currently has over 45 million people.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs spokesperson said the advent of the Covid pandemic saw and increase in the number of Ugandans applying for passports, prompting them to upgrade their system, in anticipation of increased application numbers.
He however said, this has not come to pass.
“As the passport office we would feel glad to have many Ugandans apply for passports and we therefore put in place a new system because we anticipated big numbers. We anticipated 3000 passport application per day but to our surprise, the number has reduced to less than 1000 applicants per day,” Mundeyi said.
According to the ministry, currently, express passport applications are now disposed of in two days with applicants receiving their passports while for ordinary applicants get their passports in 10 working days.
“If you apply for an express passport, you will be given an appointment in the next 30 minutes. I therefore call upon Ugandans to desist from using brokers to apply for passports because there is no reason to do this when system is as efficient as it can be.”