More than 45 000 Zimbabweans were issued with passports from 01 December to the 29th, the Civil Registry Department has said.
Official statistics show that 92 313 Zimbabweans applied for e-passports during the same period.
Most of the applicants wanted to beat the 01 January 2024 deadline, when passport fees go up.
Effective tomorrow, the fee for ordinary passports will rise from US$120 to US$150, while the fee for emergency passports will increase from US$200 to US$250.
Civil Registry Department Registrar-General (RG), Henry Machiri, told The Sunday News that the unusually long queues at passport offices are in response to the imminent new fees. He said:
Legally, from January 1, the new fee becomes effective and the old fee will no longer apply, so this is the reason you also see quite many people in queues during this time.
Normally, we get more people during the Christmas holiday because we have citizens in the diaspora who use the holidays to also get an opportunity to apply for new passports.
Machiri said despite the large number of people who have applied for passports, the department has enough raw materials to cater for every applicant. He said:
Let me also assure the nation that, despite the rise in the number of applications we are receiving, we do have enough consumables to make sure that those who are applying for their passports are getting them on time.
For the ordinary passport, it is (a maximum of) seven days and for the urgent passport, it is within 48 hours; that is, two days.
The RG said old passports are still valid until their expiry date and will not be phased out soon. He said:
The machine-readable passport is still a valid document. We understand people have been going around saying that it will expire after two years, which is not true.
The electronic passport is not yet mandatory. Yes, it is an advantage for Zimbabwe, as we have done, to go on the electronic passport, but our citizens who are still using the machine-readable passport should know the old passport will expire according to the validity date written in the passport.
In early December, the Civil Registry Department extended working hours at passport offices from 7 AM to 7 PM during weekdays and 8 AM to 3 PM on Saturdays.
Presenting the 2024 National Budget in November, Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion Minister Mthuli Ncube proposed to almost double passport fees.
Ncube had proposed to increase the fee for an ordinary passport to US$200, but the figure was later revised to US$150 following an uproar.
More: Pindula News