Due to missing information, many passports are still pending at the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

According to Simon Mundeyi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the applicants have deliberately declined to complete the required information for various reasons, even after being reminded.

“We have several passports that have been deferred. This means you come, apply for a passport but because of insufficient information that you have availed, we cannot process that passport, so we keep it in abeyance,” he noted.

During the weekly joint security briefing on Monday, December 18, 2023, Mundeyi revealed that the ministry later learnt that some of the applicants had engaged in incest, sired children with their brothers, uncles or fathers, and were only trying to defend themselves.

This was one of the reasons why many had declined to fill the gaps.

“We have so many pending cases of passport application. Surprisingly one of the key reasons for a few we have been scrutinizing is failure to respond to questions put out by passport officers. And these deferrals are usually caused by failure to input correct information in the application that does tally with that at the National Identification Regulatory Authority (NIRA),” he noted.

Mundeyi emphasized that all the information provided on the passport application must be accurate, particularly the parent-related information.

Incest a serious issue

He noted that there has been a lot of incest, forcing some women to conceive with their brothers and fathers.

“Because of this they cannot feel free to input that information in the passport application system,” he added.

Rather than leaving empty spaces, Mundeyi asked anyone experiencing such problems to go to the immigration office and confidentially share the information in order to receive assistance.

He mentioned that recently the immigration office received a significant case of a woman with a son who had been awarded a scholarship to study in Canada, but was stuck.

“The father of the son was unfortunately her elder brother. So, she reached a moment where she could not lie anymore and she needed a passport for this boy because he had an opportunity to go and study. We just saw the lady bursting into tears and efforts to calm her down fell on deaf ears,” he added.

Mundeyi, said the lady exposed the truth after receiving counseling for a considerable amount of time.

“There are so many such cases, one came with a biological father, again who fathered children with a daughter. So, such cases are coming up and complicating passport work. So, sometimes the public might be bashing the passport office for delaying passports, but these are some of the complications we get,” he added.  

He pointed out that a child born in Uganda, even if fathered by “your relative,” is still entitled to a passport.

“Even if the father of your child is your brother, father or your uncle, we know these things