Harare motorists trying to evade paying parking fees in the central business district (CBD) have resorted to parking their vehicles near the Central Registry offices, pretending they were passport seekers, Registrar-General Tobaiwa Mudede told Parliament yesterday.
Mudede also accused politicians for the chaos at his offices saying they promised prospective voters funding for cross- border businesses as a bait as elections draw closer.
Mudede was speaking before the Public Accounts Portfolio Committee chaired by Makoni West MP Webber Chinyadza, who had invited him and Secretary for Home Affairs Melusi Matshiya to explain discrepancies in the 2009 audit reports of their departments.
Responding to a question by Chikomba East MP Edgar Mbwembwe who wanted to know whether Central Registry was coping with the long queues of passport seekers and vehicles often seen parked near the passport offices, Mudede said the cars belonged to people evading paying parking fees in the CBD.
“We have long queues of cars belonging to people who cannot pay parking fees pretending to be passport seekers and parking at our offices and that has created confusion because it gives the impression that we are failing to deal with the queues,” Mudede said.
“We have had meetings with the city council to deal with the issue, but currently we still have lots of people seeking passports because of deportations from South Africa, and instead of those people seeking services from their provincial offices, they have realised it is much faster to seek that service in Harare.”
Mudede also said: “Our machines can print 2 000 copies of passports per day if they are not affected by electricity outages or breakdowns. We are also able to produce a passport in 30 minutes and that is the one which costs $318 and is issued out for emergency cases like people who have lost their passports and are urgently travelling.
“We can also issue out a passport to someone in the United States of America. For a three-day passport, we charge $250 and a normal passport is $50.”
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Matshiya said completion of construction of Central Registry offices which has now taken 15 years would enable them to process documents timeously.
