By Kei Emmanuel Duku
Disgruntled citizens on Thursday stormed the Department of Nationality, Passport, and Immigration, accusing officials of lying and failing to issue passports and national identity cards on time.
A woman whose child requires urgent medical treatment in Israel said she had been waiting since May for her child’s passport despite paying all required fees.
“My child is ten years old and missed a chance to go to Israel for surgery because of this passport issue,” she lamented. “We have been sleeping on the streets, without food or water. What will I do if the medical team returns and my child cannot go?”
Students also expressed frustration over delays, claiming missed scholarship opportunities due to the prolonged passport processing.
“I am not staying in Juba, I came to process my passport. I have been wasting money traveling to Juba for nothing and we are losing scholarships because of the delays, we have presented letters from the Ministry of Education and Foreign Affairs showing we need the passport because we have applied for a scholarship but they kept dodging us,” said one student who did not reveal his name.
In response, Gen. Simon Majur Pabek the Director General of the Directorate of Nationality, Civil Registry, Passport, and Immigration attributed the delays to a shortage of passport booklets, stating that the expected delivery last week had not materialized.
He admitted that still the department has a backlog of applicants dating back to 2012 and urged citizens to be patient.
The passport office has previously faced criticism over delays, with a shortage of booklets blamed on unpaid debts to a German printing company.
South Sudan halted the issuance of the Nationality Certificate Identification Card and passport in 2020 after its German Technology provider shut down the system over failure to pay an accumulative bill of USD 6.9 million.
The government resumed the issuance of regular passports and nationality IDs on November 20, 2021, after the Ministry of Finance paid USD 3.4 million to the Company.
On April last year, the German firm temporarily stopped providing the country with booklets after the government failed to clear its balance. Out of USD 6.9 million, the remaining balance was 1.74 million US dollars.
That placed the immigration department between a rock and a hard place as regular passport booklets were stockpiled due to Mauhlbauer’s refusal to send booklets until all arrears were cleared by the government.