Maputo port immigration officials to be disciplined

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Maputo port immigration officials to be disciplined

8:34 CAT | 15 Dec 2017

File photo / SENAMI spokesperson Cira Fernande

The Mozambican National Immigration Service (SENAMI) is taking disciplinary action against seven immigration officials who sabotaged the visit of a cruise ship to Maputo last Sunday, reports Friday’s issue of the independent daily O Pais.

The incident is more serious than initially believed. For the cruise ship, was carrying, not 400 tourists, as the first stories reported, but 564, all of whom had intended to spend several hours in Maputo.

There were 341 Americans, 131 Canadians, 18 Germans, 14 Australians, and 11 Britons while the rest were of other nationalities. To visit Maputo, each of these tourists should have paid 50 US dollars – or a total of 28,200 dollars. This was the money lost to the Mozambican state when the tourists were unable to disembark because the immigration officials claimed the equipment to read passports and issue frontier visas was not working.

Each tourist would certainly have purchased food, drink and possibly souvenirs while in Maputo – so this was several thousand dollars lost to the Maputo economy.

SENAMI spokesperson Cira Fernandes said the officials at the port did not inform their superiors of the problem. Only later did the SENAMI management discover that the ship, which docked at 10.40 on Sunday, spent three hours in the port without a single tourist disembarking. The ship then gave up and continued its journey to the South African port of Durban.

Fernandes said the visit was planned well in advance. The date and time the ship would arrive was known, and so a team of immigration officials as scheduled to be on hand at the port, checking passports and issuing frontier visas.

Fernandes accused the seven officials of “acting in bad faith because they did not communicate with the relevant bodies, namely the Maputo City Immigration Directorate”.

Furthermore a later investigation showed that the officials’ excuse, that the machines were out of order, was untrue. “In fact, they were just badly connected”, said Fernandes. “From the inquiry we undertook, we found that the cables had just been wrongly connected”.

Source: AIM