Another hitch affects production of passports but fixed

New Machine for printing the new Kenyan East African Passports (PHOTO: Beverlyne Musili,Standard)

NAIROBI, KENYA: Immigration department says it has solved a technical hitch that affected production of passports on Tuesday in Nairobi.

The Department said it experienced connectivity challenges in its servers affecting passport and EFNS services.

Tuesday’s hitch which affected up to 2,000 passports is the second one in a month. Between January 11 and 15, production was affected for five days following a countrywide outage.

This saw a backlog of up to 12,000 passports which has since then been cleared.

“We had some connectivity challenge that was resolved later in the day. Today all services will be available, that is from passport applications to EFNS services,” said the department in a notice.

A new printing machine that was installed last year produces 2000 new passports daily up from 800 previously printed.

The government rolled out issuance of the e-passports and announced that the current passports will however remain in use up to 2019 as the rollout continues after which they will be rendered obsolete.

The rollout is expected to cost the government Sh500 million and is being facilitated by a technology installed by the Pakistani government.

The new documents bear the East African Community name and that of Kenya with an aim of showing unity in the region.