Interior and National Administration Cabinet Secretary (CS) Kithure Kindiki made an impromptu visit to the Eastern Regional Immigration Offices in Embu Town on a fact-finding mission on Tuesday.
While expressing satisfaction with service delivery at the offices, Prof. Kindiki said he also wanted to check how far the reforms instituted to streamline the issuance of passports had cascaded to the regional offices.
“You can clean up the headquarters but still have bottlenecks in the regional offices, and that is why I decided to make the surprise visit here,” he said.
He also announced plans to initiate a nationwide Rapid Results Initiative (RRI) on the collection of passports on Wednesday next week.
The CS said that in pursuit of enhancing service delivery, they had also discovered that there were quite a number of uncollected passports in almost all the offices across the country.
He said the Embu office alone was holding approximately six thousand uncollected passports.
Kindiki said they were going to make it mandatory for all those who had applied for passports to collect them within the period to be announced on Wednesday.
“We will even publish those passport numbers and the names of the applicants, telling them they must come and collect them,” he said, adding that more measures will be announced for those who decline.
He continued, “You cannot put us under pressure as immigration officers to give you a passport, then when it is printed, you don’t come for it.”
The CS added that for those who will ultimately fail to collect theirs, the law will be applied in terms of finding a way of disposing of them.
At the same time, Kindiki said they will be increasing the number of staff at the Embu offices from 20 to 30 to ease the workload.
He also said they will make a facelift of the facility to make it more conducive to work.
“Our officers are working in a very congested and constrained environment, and we have undertaken to improve the facility,” he said.
By Samuel Waititu
