Passports Office Messed Up

It has emerged from the corridors of the Ghana Passports Office that the servers they were using in dealing with the biometric registration exercise installed in 2010 was already out of date prior to being installed. The judicious use of the servers which were purchased in 2005 when the exercise was initially earmarked to have started delayed and instead of purchasing new ones, the same were installed five years later when they “were already obsolete”. This revelation was made by the director of passports, Alexander Grant Ntrakwa when he was responding to questions from a section of the media during a press conference held to update the public on the processes and procedures in acquiring passports. “the equipment was purchased in 2005 from Berlin, but deployed in 2010 by which time it was already obsolete, so at the time that we were implementing the biometric registration exercise, it was appropriate new machines were purchased, but we went ahead and installed the equipment that was purchased in 2005. So, from the word go, we realized that the servers were already obsolete, and since 2010, there has been no proper re-tooling as far as passports office is concerned,” Mr Ntrakwa stated. According to him, when “I assumed office in August 26, last year, we had about 25,000 passports that were okay to be printed, but the office had only two single slot printers which later broke down.” This, he said, made it difficult for them to process the application forms that were ready and had been entered into the server, hence the delay in completing most of the forms they received. “By the time the ministry got us two machines on the 16 of May 2015, we had accumulated again over 26,000 passports forms that were okay t be printed, not those waiting to be vetted and we had since printed over 40,000 forms.” The director of passports also stated that, there were no completed passport forms at his outfit waiting to be printed saying, “As we speak we don’t have passports that are okay that have not been printed,” he clarified. He was emphatic that, newly installed servers have been made available to start processing all the forms that will be vetted subsequently and are ready to be printed.

Source: Daily Heritage