Dear Editor,
Applying for a passport at the passport office in George-town is a very long and tedious process. About two weeks ago I had to accompany a member of my church to identify that person to the immigration officer in charge because the person did not have a national identification card.
We arrived at the passport office at 7 am. I had to join a very long line with the individual to get our documents verified by an immigration officer, and that took over one hour. We were then asked to sit on chairs in another long line. Another officer then picked out about 8 persons in the ‘chair line’ to go over to the passport office building which is now under repairs. Those persons then had to join yet another line to apply for their new passport. I noted with interest that people who travelled from as far as Berbice, Linden and Essequibo, etc, were told to return the next day because numbers had already been given out. These are people who arrived around 8-8.30 am. After spending all that money to travel to Georgetown for a passport they were turned down by a rude immigration officer. It’s ridiculous for our Guyanese people living in ten regions to travel to Georgetown for a passport, when that same passport could have been given at an immigration office in their region. When I was living in Berbice I obtained my passport at New Amsterdam.
I waited in my ‘chair line’ up to 2 pm, then I was asked to go with the person I was identifying into the office building. We were taken into another department and placed in a ‘bench line.’ We waited there for a while, then we went to an officer to pay $4000 dollars for the passport. When that was finished we were asked to go to another ‘bench line.’ The line moved like a snail as we waited to get our documents verified again, and then moved to another booth to get the person’s photograph taken. All that took another two hours. By then those who had waited all day in the ‘bench line’ outside had been asked to return next day. I left immigration around 4.20 pm.
Why is it from the very inception that the officer who verified our documents couldn’t receive our application fees, issue a receipt and get the applicant’s picture taken at the same time by an assisting officer? Why do we have to waste the whole day just to apply for a simple passport? Why do people travelling from Berbice and other parts of the country have to be running up and down for passports for the whole week, wasting thousands of dollars in travelling expenses? Why can’t this new passport system be decentralised to every region in Guyana? These are questions the Ministry of Home Affairs needs to answer for the Guyanese public.
In this day and age of advanced technology, a passport should be issued quite easily. In some countries those applying for a passport can do so online. This new system of machine readable passports is not different from the old system we had in place. What is different is everything is in a computer and your picture is taken by a digital camera. That this system is not in place tells me clearly that immigration officers lack the skills necessary to deal with these simple issues. In all my travels, Guyana is the only country where I have seen such long lines and where there is so much waiting for simple issues to be addressed.
It’s time the administration woke up from its slumber and put a better system in place. As we are about to celebrate another independence we should ask ourselves what have we achieved as a nation after 42 years of struggling. The answer is simple: we have achieved nothing that can compete with the Caribbean and the wider world. If we cannot deal with a simple passport application in minutes, it’s not possible for us to govern a very strong nation in years to come.
Yours faithfully,
Rev Gideon Cecil
