The offices would serve the needs of persons in those regions wanting to apply for biometric passports, bringing to an end the era where, would-be applicants had to come all the way to the national capital, Accra, to have their applications processed.
The Minister of Foreign, Alhaji Muhammad Mumuni, who was personally present at the Kumasi inauguration said, given the enormous interest shown by the Ghanaian public since the new system was introduced, they were compelled to speed up the decentralization of the system.
This, he said would help to significantly ease pressure on applicants and save them the trouble of travelling all the way to Accra to acquire passports.
Alhaji Mumuni said two more additional centres in Tamale and Ho would be ready by close of year and Ghana’s missions abroad in Berlin, Washington DC, Rome and London would also have offices of their own to cater for applicants in the diaspora.
He said he was confident the new passport system would lead to considerable reduction in the chronic problems of identity theft and other fraudulent activities that characterized the old passport regime.
Ghana, he said has now fully complied with the directive from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) which required member countries to adopt machine-readable passports by 2015.
The biometric passport captures both demographic and biometric data of applicants and transmits these electronically to the central operation and production centre at the main office for processing and issuance of the passport.
The history of passports in Ghana started with the hand-written and later machine readable passports, now being phased out by the UN to give way to the biometric passport or e-passport.
The new biometric passport has a validity date of five years after which applicants can re-apply for a renewal.
Ghana’s system was facilitated by Buck Press, a wholly owned Ghanaian “blue chip” printing company, with years of experience in the security printing industry.
Buck Press has also catered for similar projects of other African countries including Liberia. The African Union (AU) introduced biometric passports to its employees in 2007.
Ex-President Kufuor was the first African head of state to be issued with one at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Obed Boafo
Quelle/Source: Accra Daily Mail, 19.01.2011
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
