By Taban Gabriel
King News 25th July 2024, Juba-Applicants who applied for passports at the immigration head office in Juba staged a peaceful protest on Thursday, decrying delays in the issuance of their identification credentials.
The aggrieved petitioners who converged at the office of the South Sudan Director for Civil Registry, Nationality, Passport and Immigration (DNPI) said they spent months following up on their travel documents to no avail.
Some of the protestors who spoke to the media through an audio clip obtained by King Media expressed discontent at the immigration institution.
“I started my process in May, and for the past three days, I have been sitting out here hungrily waiting for my child’s passport, but it seems there is no positive sign from the officials and my child, who has been sick for a while and in need of medical intervention abroad, can’t now travel due to the delays in passport processing,” an anonymous lady who spoke in simple Arabic said.
“Some of us stay in far places and have been coming here for months now, and others even for years, wasting money on transport hoping to get our passports, and at the end of the day, you get nothing at all,” aggrieved male protestants said.
Some of the aggrieved applicants at South Sudan, Passport, and Immigration premises
“We are losing scholarships because of this. We have proofs of letters from the Ministries of Education and letters from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, so that is the problem now; we are not getting anything,” he continued.
While addressing the angry protestors, the Director at DNPI, Simon Majur Pabek, attributed the passport booklet delay to financial clearance by some government institutions.
“Whatever happens, it is the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance, and you can see that the Central Bank is there. Once they pay the money, our work is only to produce and issue the passports,” Majur said
When asked about the date the booklets will arrive in the country, Director Major said, “Only when the financial institutions cleared the payment.”
“I can’t tell you when the passports will arrive, because last week I promised you that they will arrive this Thursday, but they didn’t arrive, so I can’t promise you again,” Majur explained.
The South Sudanese passport is printed by the German firm Muhlbauer; in 2023, the government said it owed the firm an accumulated sum of $1.7 million, which affected the delivery of booklets at the time.
By press time, King Media was unable to independently ascertain whether the halt in passport production was due to the financial issues attributed to the Director of DNPI.