Parliametary Special Initiave (PSI) On Ghana Passports

……….to restore its credibility

It is embarrassing, appalling and most disheartening what most Ghanaians go through at many international airports before they are allowed to enter their destination countries.
Ghanaians who travel frequently on European and North American routes and are always au courant or acquainted with immigration procedures on these routes will testify to this phenomenon.
The search for reasons for the long waits, denigrating and discomforting searches and questions do not require any stretch of one’s mind to find answers for. It is simply a credibility issue. The credibility of the Ghanaian passport has been knocked down to unreasonable ‘lows’ by the activities of Ghanaian passport contractors or middle-men and their official collaborators at the immigration offices around the country.
The impunity with which some of these individuals execute their acts makes one to wonder if we really care about the corporate/collective image of our country. They seem to care less about the nefarious activities some of these unscrupulous individuals, who through unapproved means acquire this all-important document, may engage in; and, to the detriment of our collective image.
The rules requiring background checks for misleading and fraudulent information on applicants go consciously unchecked. The motivation is the individual’s ability to provide the financial resource the middle-men and the facilitating officers require from them. It is, therefore, not the least surprising that an undercover journalist could feign as a middleman, perform the rituals and have passports issued in the names of no mean persons in our society than the president, the Vice president and the IGP. It is a clear manifestation of how reckless our institutions entrusted with national responsibilities have failed in the discharge of their duties over the years. Operatives of these institutions and their collaborators have combined to ruin our national image in the international community.
If one followed immigration news around the globe carefully, one would realise that there have been many high-profile drug related cases, impersonations and many other fraudulent activities to outwit immigration officers at the frontiers of their countries by holders of Ghanaian passports who may not be necessarily Ghanaians nor deserve to carry this documents. It is by reason of this that one cannot blame the immigration officers at the frontiers of these countries for what, sometimes, might look too humiliating for travellers carrying Ghanaian passport.
Is it time for the Ghanaian parliament to institute a Parliamentary special initiative (PSI) to look into this matter without further delay? It may take many years to restore our national identity, for that matter or passport, to a level which will be acceptable as a trustworthy travel document at the international frontiers. Our honourable legislators must, however, be mindful of the fact that these measures do not require any ad hock strategies filled with partisan acrimonies which might hinder them from reaching the root of the problem and addressing it.
There is strong logic for Ghanaians—home and abroad—to clamour for peremptory measures from ‘the powers that be’ towards sweeping and unmitigated overhaul of the processes and procedures involved in the acquisition of a Ghanaian passport. This will in the long-run lead to the restoration of some level of trust in the Ghana ‘blue book.
Let’s consider the fact that the birth certificate in Ghana is one of the requirements for the acquisition of a Ghanaian passport. In the light of the current procedures, I estimate that the acquisition of the birth certificate takes away about 50% of the burden of proof on the individual who intends to acquire one.
The question then is: How are our birth and death registries secured to prevent both local and foreign infiltrations? To any keen observer, they are as porous as just walking to the front desk in any of our birth and death registries around the country and performing the ritual: HEAVEN HELP THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES, as one immigration officer referred to it on my recent trip to the homeland.
Incontrovertibly, if operatives at Ghana’s passport office and other immigration offices around the country are culpable for collaborating with middle-men in the issuance of Ghanaian passports to undeserving individuals, then officers at the birth and death registries around the country are equally culpable.
On the issue of acquiring a birth certificate and a passport, I vividly recollect making a proposal to the Ministry of Interior in 1998 as to how they could strengthen the system, ward off foreign infiltration and prevent multiple acquisition of the document by locals (I am abroad now and do not have access to my files to quote the references). But eight years on, we are still battling to restore order in the processes involved in the acquisition of our most important national documents.
The news that over 300 fraudulent birth certificates were uncovered by officials of the Ghana Birth and Death Registry posted to the passport office(GNA June 19, 2006), makes a good case for constant collaboration between the two institutions at all levels to weed out the fraudsters in this business.
Unfortunately, we might not see this happening frequently and on national basis as we may be expecting. The reason is that that Birth and Death Registries across the country lack the basic logistics and manpower to carrying out even their most core duty or function of capturing accurate data for development and other purposes (GNA June 6, 2006).
However, the hope of securing a national data base for Ghanaian identity holders (national ID cards) is said to be on course and may close some of the loopholes use by fraudsters to acquire Ghanaian passports. But in my opinion, it will be an exercise in futility if the birth and death registries, especially at the local levels, are not empowered logistically and with the requisite manpower to function properly, meaning being also able to conduct some investigative exercise on individuals who require the document.
Let’s hope the august house treats this issue with the urgency it deserves in order to restore some form of credibility to our ‘blue book’ and other national documents.