Clearing the backlog is not the same as clearing the demand

Oct 08, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – If you are not in line by 5 am each morning outside of the Passport Office, you are not likely to be successful in handing-in your passport application form. The Central Passport Office works on a daily quota, based on their assessment of the number of applications which can be processed during the day. By 9 o’ clock that quota is reached and the disappointed have to return another day in the hop of having their application processed.

As much therefore as the public may get excited by the President’s announcement that a backlog of 5,000 passports is going to be cleared in one week, this does not address the fundamental concern about the average daily processing capacity of passports. Persons are still going to have to line up from early morning and persons are still going to be turned away by 9 am, unless there is an increase in the daily number of passports which can be processed each day.

There is now no longer a system for renewing passports every five years. A renewal now amounts to having to be issued with a new passport. And since every Guyanese here and many overseas want to have a Guyanese passport, we are looking at an average of 200,000 passports having to be issued each year – 150,000 passport for resident Guyanese and an average of 50,000 for non-residents. This is an estimated total annual demand.

Based on this amount, the passport office needs to be able to process 300 passports per day. This is challenging for the Central Passport Office.  As such, the government needs to investment in a large pool of equipment and workers for the passport office.

It also needs to continue what was done under the APNU+AFC – have more than one center for the collection of passport applications. The APNU+AFC did what the PPP/C was afraid to do; it offices for passport applications in Berbice and Linden and Anna Regina.

The PPP/C should take this a step further and have a passport office at Rosignol Police Station, one on the East Coast of Demerara, one on the West Bank of Demerara and one on the East Bank of Demerara. This would ease the burden on the Central Passport Office. In fact, that office should be closed to the public and a police station in Georgetown identified for the processing of passport applications. Unless this sort of decentralization takes place, the passport office is not going to be able to cope with the demand for services.

It is not rocket science. Merely clearly, the backlog is not going to clear the demand for passports. There are thousands of Guyanese who are not part of the backlog but are without passports because they simply are not willing to be part of the hassle to join any long line from early morning.

It all comes down to math. If the passport office can print 300 passports per day sustainably, then there should be no problem. If there is still a problem, then it means there needs to be audit to determine why there is a greater demand that usual.

The President is having the passport office work around the clock to clear a backlog of 5,000 passports in one week. But what happens when this backlog is cleared and the additional demand kicks in. We will be back to square one and the long lines and the early morning queues.

Officialdom likes to see queues. It makes them feel important. Guyanese have long lost the sense of what customer service means. Now that the President has taken an interest in the backlog of passports – incidentally this was major complaint raised in his recent meeting with the New York diaspora – perhaps there can be more systematic approach to both the issuance of passports and birth certificates.

If you lose your passport, you should be required to pay a hefty fee and not the normal fee. This will serve as an incentive for people to take greater care of their key documents. But if we continue with the tradition of charging unrealistic and uneconomical fees, we are going to continue to have this demand for passports.

Every Guyanese regardless of their place of residence should be entitled to a passport. But surely if you are travelling on a foreign passport, you should be asked to not travel on a Guyanese passport. People have to make a choice. No one should be allowed to travel on both a US and a Guyanese passport.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Applications, Central Passport Office, number, quota, Rosignol Police Station

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