Monday, March 8, 2004 - Eastafrican - Nairobi- Kenya
Focus on East African Customs Union
'Kenyans Acquiring Ugandan Passports'
BY A.MUTUMBA-LULE
THE EAST AFRICAN
Though the system of acquiring a passport passes through five stages many people have been beating it especially at the grass root. For one to acquire a passport, his/her application forms have to be certified by a respected civil servant and signed by a local council chairman in the area where he stays.
Parish chiefs, before going to county chiefs (Local Council three chairmen), must endorse the forms to the resident district commissioner and then the forms are also scrutinised by the district security officers before being submitted to the immigration department.
Some Congolese nationals who ran away from the eastern part of the Congo during the civil strife in the mineral rich country between 1996 and 2000, now pass off as Ugandans and some even carry Ugandan passports.
At present a number of Rwandan nationals have Ugandan passports acquired when they were still in Uganda as refugees before going back to their country after the 1994 Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) take-over of government.
In Uganda, like in other countries it is illegal to acquire a passport fraudulently when one is not a national. The penalty is imprisonment.
Ministry of Internal Affairs officials blame the rampant acquisition of Ugandan documents by foreigners especially Kenyan and Rwandan nationals on how the colonial masters streamlined the common borders.
For example on the Rwanda/Uganda border there are some houses which are divided into two by the border-line. But this is also a contemporary problem. During the border dispute between Uganda and Tanzania in the last three years, a number of families found themselves straddling the border when a redefinition was made.
Dr. Kagoda said that the ways they are now discussing would make the fraudulent acquisition of Ugandan passports very hard.
The wars that the country has experienced for several years till 1986 had led to a breakdown in all departments dealing with documentation. Until recently it was very easy to get a passport and that is the reason as to why many aliens were coming to Uganda to acquire passports.
But the ministry of Internal Affairs has since made passports have scanned pictures. Uganda is not the only victim of passport racketeering. A number of countries are facing the same problem while Ugandan nationals themselves have been implicated in the scum themselves.
Two years ago, Ugandans who had acquired South African passports and went to UK were deported to South Africa were they got stranded.
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