Kenyan Immigration Department Sets New Requirements to Acquire an e-Passport

The Department of Immigration Services has outlined new requirements to apply for a new e-passport that Netizens don’t seem to really applaud.

New applicants for the e-passport will now be required to produce a recommender’s Identity Card which a majority of Kenyans online termed as irrelevant. Kenyans also brought to light the issue of the documents the department was demanding to process a passport as same documents required to process an ID and should hence be in their systems terming it as backwardness in an era considered to be digital.

The process to acquire an e-passport in Kenya will now require the following: an original Identity Card, the original Birth certificate and a copy of the same, a copy of the ID of the recommender, online filled forms, 3 Invoices, 3 passport size photos, and one’s parents ID copies.

Some of the noted complaints are on Twitter and read as follows:

“Quick question, why should a Kenyan citizen require another Citizen’s recommendation to get a passport?”

“Why don’t you use details of my old passport to the new e-passport and save me all that mystery above”

“You guys are big time jokers…are you not always ashamed of all those queues at Nyayo house… why not take advantage of technology, where someone can check online the status of his/her passport if is ready or not, then queue for 3 hours only to be told ”come next week again”

“We have people with long-dead parents and can’t trace their (parents’) IDs, what happens to them?

“Asking a lot of irrelevant documents just to make it hard… What a disaster!!!

“Just for the record, we are in the Gregorian calendar year of our Lord Two Thousand and Nineteen. Style up!”