Immigration Brigades To Replace Faulty Passports As Mozambican Miners Stopped At Border

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Immigration Brigades To Replace Faulty Passports As Mozambican Miners Stopped At Border

9:59 CAT | 01 Dec 2015

Jornal Notícias (File) / The Ressano Garcia Border.

Special brigades from the Mozambican Immigration Services (SENAMI) have been at Ressano Garcia, on the border with South Africa, since last week, attending to cases of returning Mozambican mineworkers whose passports are not being accepted because of a defect in their manufacture.

The problem lies in the passport bar code which has somehow been misprinted and cannot be read by scanners at the border posts. Brigades have been sent to the border to issue any mineworker facing this problem with a travel document so that he can return to Mozambique for the festive season.

According to the national director of immigration, Arsenia Massingue, cited in Monday’s issue of the Maputo daily ‘Noticias’, thousands of passports were produced with a fault in the bar code, and that entire batch mist be replaced. These faulty passports were issued to miners during the campaign in South Africa to replace the old, manual passports with biometric passports. No such problem was noted in passports issued in Mozambique.

Massingue said the problem came to light on 24 November, the date when the manual passport ceased to be accepted for travel purposes, and the miners could only cross the border if they had a biometric document.

“We were taken by surprise with the news that there were Mozambican citizens, workers on the South African mines and farms, who presented passports at the border which the machines couldn’t read”, said Massingue. “As an immediate measure we sent brigades to the border who are replacing the documents at zero cost for the bearer. All travel documents that the machines can’t read are being replaced”.

SENAMI already had a team at the border with machines to issue new passports to deal with cases of miners who had been unable to acquire biometric passports at all. That team has now been strengthened to deal with the faulty biometric documents. The number of machines at Ressano Garcia issuing passports has been increased from four to 12.

“The recommendations we gave to our colleagues at Ressano Garcia was to work until they have attended to the last miner”, declared Massingue. “No miner should be left without documents”.

Source: AIM