By William Madouk
The Directorate of Civil Registry Nationality Passport and Immigration said it has renewed the passports and national IDs printing contract with the Germany Company, Mauhlbauer.
Lt-Col David Oromo Jobo, Deputy Director for the ICT department at the Directorate of Civil Registry, Nationality, passport and Immigration, said they travelled in early February to discuss cooperation with the firm.
“One of the major agendas was the technical discussion between the company and the institution itself – DCNPI, some of the main agenda that we look ahead are as follows to continue with cooperation,” Jobo told journalist yesterday.
“We come out with an agreement that they [Mauhlbauer] will continue supplying us with the documents as we wait for pending payment,” he added.
Mauhlbauer was contracted by the government in 2011, however, the German Technology provider shut down the system in 2020 over failure by the authority to pay accrued bills of $6.9 million which led the country to halt the issuance of National documents.
The government resumed the issuance of regular passports and nationality on November 2021, after the government through the Ministry of Finance paid USD 3.4 million.
Mr Jobo said, the Director General of DCRNPI, Lt-Gen Atem Marol Biar also discussed the next-generation passport with the company and mechanisms on how to settle the pending amount.
“The new generation of passports has come to the level that every country will deal with security. So, when it comes to security we need also to update our passports, national certificates and IDs,” Jobo said.
“Also not forgetting when we look into this kind of new generation we also look at other aspects of the current cry that East Africa passport,” he explained.
Deputy Director for ICT said since increases for the acquisition of national documents were made public are not at ease and they were wondering what benefit they could gain.
He added that the immigration department decided to roll-out out the passports with a 10-year validity period rather than 5 years.
“For an adult will remain, move and transit it to what we call update to 10 years for a child we need to capture biometric – so a child has what we call a change of feasibility and we need biometric to be captured. So a child will remain 5 years and an adult will be 10 years,” Jobo said but did not disclose when it will take effect.
Mr Jobo revealed that Biar also travelled to Turkey and met with his counterpart to sensitize them about South Sudanese types of passports and issues facing South Sudanese travelling to Ankara.
“What we discuss with Turkey is the movement of our people because our citizens travel to Turkey and some of these documents like passports were not known to their leadership for example official, special and business passports were not known,” he stressed.