Alusine Joaque, Ag. Immigrations director
By Mustapha Kamara
Acting administrative director at the Sierra Leone Immigrations Department has disclosed that they are planning to move “from the old readable machine system to a modern biometric passport system”.
Alusine Joaque told Politico that the scarcity of passports was as a result of plans by the internal affairs ministry to switch over to a new biometric passport system, leading to the unavailability of passports to travel out of the country.
“We have decided to change to a biometric system because we want to follow modern trends”, Joaque said, adding that the ministry had stopped bringing into the country any readable passport machine.
He said that at the moment they had received a lot of application forms from citizens who were in need of passports “but only a few of them would be able to secure passports at the moment”.
He said they were only issuing 20 passports a day mostly to sick people in need of urgent medical attention abroad, but also to those travelling on national duties, among them soldiers and doctors.
He pleaded with the public to exercise patience with them, noting that everyone would have to cope with the present situation until they switched to a biometric system of operation.
(C) Politico 09/09/14
