The Ministry of Internal Affairs has threatened to destroyed 12,580 passports which remain uncollected.
Internal Affairs spokesperson, Simon Mundeyi said the 12,580 are the newer versions of the electronic passports that are uncollected and are creating a storage backlog.
“We have another 12580 passports in our stores . We have called out applicants, sent messages but no one is coming .We cant publish each because of privacy laws. They will be destroyed after a certain period of time if the owners don’t come for them,” Mundeyi said.
He added that they also have over 60,000 passports returned recently by labour export companies after failure to take Ugandans abroad for work.
The Internal Affairs spokesperson revealed that recently, they destroyed 158,000 passports which had not been collected for over three years.
He urged owners to pick them from their passport collection centre in Kyambogo.
Last year, the ministry announced it was struggling to store about 50,000 passports which remained uncollected.
“In some rare circumstances, the passports are ready, messages are sent to them to collect them but their phones are off or they don’t have network. If a message is sent and the phone is off or doesn’t have network, it will bounce and will never come back,” Mundeyi said.
Internal Affairs also explained that the accumulation of uncollected passports is also due to a nosedive in export of Ugandan labour to Middle East of late.
“Most of these passports belong to girls who were supposed to be taken to Middle East and since business has nosedived, they lost interest in the documents as they returned to their villages.”
