IMMIGRATION Department yesterday issued strong warning against indiscriminate uses of travel documents for identification within the country.
Commissioner of Immigration, Passports
and Citizenship, Gerald Kihinga, issued the warning in Dar es Salaam in
an interview with Tanzania Standards Newspapers Limited owned media
outlets.
Commissioner Kihinga decried increasing
cases of lost passports under negligent circumstances,...
saying the
documents’ replacement was unnecessary huge burden to the government.
“The passport is the travel document
whose purposes are served only when the holder is travelling outside the
country. But, unfortunately, people now use passports as identification
credentials in various businesses within the country. This is wrong,” he affirmed.
He
said investigations have revealed that majority people reporting the
loss of their passports to the department had the tendency of carrying
the documents with them wherever they went in their daily movements
within the country.
“Just imagine, one reporting the loss of
the passport and upon inquiries on the circumstances under which the
document went missing, he claims to have learnt of the loss after
arriving at Kariakoo from his Mbagala home,” exemplified Mr Kihinga.
Apart from using it as the travel
document, the passport can be used as an ID only when the holder is
outside the country, he said.
The commissioner discouraged the keeping
of passports in car drawers for motorists and in handbags for women,
saying the tendency increases the chances of losing it, saying should
the department establish that the document was negligently lost, it will
decline the request for replacement.
Mr Kihinga refuted reports that the
department had run out of books to print the travel documents. “I can
confidently assure the public that we have enough passport books,
whatever is said outside there is mere hearsay,” he insisted.
The commissioner admitted that sometimes
the department can take time to conduct due diligence on the document
applicant, saying: “If they fail getting the documents within the time
frame, they start speculating, sometimes claiming that we have run out
of passport books.”
He told passport applicants to
understand that though every Tanzanian had a right to acquire a
passport, the department had prerogative mandate to offer or reject it
to an individual, subject to some reasons, including criminal records
and travel motives.
The commissioner also warned applicants against using middlemen in processing their passport applications.
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