Great news for thousands of Fijians as 30,000 passport books have landed in the country and are at the Immigration Office in Suva, with 400 passports printed today.
This was revealed by Minister for Immigration, Viliame Naupoto during his ministerial statement this morning in Parliament, saying that they will work this weekend to have around 3,000 passports printed by Monday.
He says the 30,000 passport books are part of 100,000 books that are being printed by the printers in Germany.
Naupoto says the remaining 70,000 will arrive in Fiji over the next few months, and given this is a new financial year, the process of ordering another 100,000 this year, is already in process.
He adds that these new books have been modified.
The Minister says collection of passports will begin from Monday from 9am to 7pm, and they have produced a schedule for those who want to come in and collect their passport, depending on when they lodged their application.
He also highlighted that working people can come in the afternoon to collect their passports, as they will be open until 8pm.
Naupoto says they expect that by the 15th of next month, they will have cleared all the backlog including those that are lodging in at this time, and they should be back to normal processing.
He says they will work on reducing the time from 15 to 10 days for the normal processing and from three to two days for urgent.
Responding to the statement, Opposition MP Alvick Maharaj acknowledged the Minister and his team for their work regarding the backlog.
He suggested that a bigger space be used for the collection of passports, as the Suva Office does not have the capacity to handle hundreds of people.
Maharaj says the Ministry can use the Vodafone Arena or the FMF Gymnasium.
He also cautioned the Immigration Department not to overwork the printers, as they can face breakdowns.
Stay tuned for the latest news on our radio stations
