Zim Govt Resumes Issuing Emergency Passports

The Zimbabwean government has resumed issuing emergency passports after a week of suspension. The registrar general Tobaiwa Mudede confirmed that they are accepting again, applications for emergency passports. The registrar general’s office had announced that they are suspending issuing emergency passports grounds that they wanted to clear a backlog of 2000 passports.

Mudede said to the press, “We had a slight problem. Like I said before the problem involved our backlog which was now going beyond four months. I won’t go into details on why, but from yesterday (Monday) we started accepting passports with a waiting time of three days and those applications are online today (Tuesday). Tomorrow (yesterday) starting in the morning we will be accepting those applications for 24 hours. We are quite happy that it did not take us a very long time, but we continue to battle with our backlog. Leave that one to us.”

He denied reports that they had run out of passport paper.

Citizens who wanted to obtain emergency passports had to apply for the regular passports.