The Founder and President of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe is campaigning against government acquisition of numerous passport offices across the country which are not serviceable to the populace.
Franklin in a phone interview with Peacefmonline.com labeled the National Communications Authority [NCA] of using state funds in “real estate business”.
He explained that, monies used to acquire buildings by the NCA as passport offices should rather be channeled into technologies that can ease pressure at the various passport offices.
According to the IMANI Boss, whereas Ghana is still building passport offices, the Kenyan government has proposed to take passport applications online.
He lauded the approach by the Kenyans and urged the Mahama-led NDC government to take a lesson from them with immediate effect.
“Stop wasting our money on building passport offices,” he said.
Franklin also took to Facebook to lament his grievances. Read below:
The Kenyan government through its foreign ministry is doing very sound things. A news item reports that "On countless occasions, the immigration department in Kenya had experienced long queue of people waiting to get either new passport documents or have their passport renewed, but most return to their homes unattended to.
Therefore, Kenyan government has proposed to take passport applications online, starting from 15th April this year. Applicants can fill the application form directly from the Embassy, or on the Immigration departments’ site, or via the citizen site (offers National ID registration and more)."
Meanwhile in Ghana we are still investing in physical passport offices with the National Communications Authority building expensive apartments in prime areas with our money and conducting frivolous consumer surveys for $5m instead of $30,000.
It seems the National Communications Authority is now in the real estate business. Anyways our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Communications must learn from the habits of highly effective countries like Kenya and stop wasting our money on buildings for passport offices. In the 2014 budget, we complained that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ GHS153,953,629 allocation for 2014 was too high.
Besides the facilitation of visits and participation of workshops to integrate Ghana into the international community, the Ministry’s only other highlighted achievements, purportedly it’s most important, is the setting up of passport offices in 6 regions on a budget of GHS 110,229,048.
The only concrete reported agenda for 2014 is the facilitation of conversion of all passports to biometric by 2015 by setting up additional offices in the remaining four regions.
Having delivered a project of a larger scope and on a smaller budget the year prior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should have received less money in 2014.
In any case, shouldn't the Passport office be able to generate enough money through the sale of the biometric passports to support these measures? Are these passports free? How much has the office generated since we went biometric, and what has the money been used for? But they must just emulate the habits of highly effective countries.
