MAPUTO– Mozambique’s Interior Ministry is to train staff of the country’s embassies and consulates overseas to issue passports and identity documents (IDs) to Mozambican citizens living abroad, according to the National Director of Civil Identification, Domingos Jofane.
Media reports here Monday quoted him as announcing this during a visit toSwaziland, where he had gone to deliver IDs to Mozambicans living in that country. Currently Mozambicans living outside the country must either return to Mozambique to apply for a new passport, or wait for the Interior Ministry to send its officers to their country of residence.
The Ministry has now admitted that the campaigns of sending officers from Maputo to various countries are an inefficient, not to mention expensive, way of providing citizens abroad with the documents to which they are entitled.
The Interior Ministry, Jofane said, is now empowering the embassies and consulates themselves to issue the documents. Staff from the Ministry’s Civil Identification Directorate and from the National Immigration Service will be sent to the embassies to assist in this training.
When this process is implanted in our main diplomatic offices, our fellow citizens will no longer be obliged to return to the country to deal with their documents, with all the costs that this implies. We shall also minimise the costs of sending brigades to collect the data, said Jofane.
In the first phase, not all embassies and consulates will be covered, only those in countries with large resident Mozambican communities. Among the countries likely to be covered in the pilot phase are South Africa, Portugal and Germany.
Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK