The government has found itself in possession of over 50,000 passports that were issued but never used by their recipients.
According to officials, the majority of these unused travel documents belonged to women who had applied for work overseas as domestic helpers.
The Internal Affairs ministry’s spokesman Mr Simon Mundeyi said some of these travel documents have remained unclaimed for longer than six years. He added that their predicament has been worsened by an additional 2000 unclaimed passports for between January to April this year .
“ We now have about 50,000 passports in our stores across the country which haven’t been claimed by the owners,”He said .
Rather than let these passports simply expire after the designated time period, authorities have decided to take the unusual step of deliberately destroying them. It is estimated that the total value of these 50,000 passports is around 12.5 billion Ugandan shillings.
While passports serve several important functions, their core purpose is to facilitate travel and movement across international borders.
They allow citizens to legally leave their home country and also gain entry into other nations, as long as any visa requirements are met. Having a valid passport serves as proof of a person’s identity and citizenship when in a foreign land.
Officials say the decision was made to burn the unused passports rather than just storing them, as holding on to documents that no one will ever make use of takes up unnecessary resources.
At the same time, destroying them prevents any risk of the travel documents falling into the wrong hands or being misused after long periods of dormancy.
So in an unusual move, our government will say goodbye to 12.5 billion shillings worth of passports that served no real purpose for their original owners. In the end, preventing wasted space and potential future problems took priority over clinging to unused travel documents.