Easier passport access for job seekers abroad
Kenyans have had to wait for about three months to receive their passports.
Kenyans seeking employment outside the country will now find it easier to obtain passports to facilitate their travel, as the government has set up special counters for migrant workers to fast-track their passport applications.
Also, two new regional immigration offices have been opened in Bungoma and Kericho to ease access to services offered by the State Department of Immigration and Citizen Services.
On Thursday, the government announced that three more regional offices would be opened soon. The new offices will be located in Garissa, Nyeri and Machakos.
Prime Cabinet Secretary (PCS) and acting Cabinet Secretary of the Ministry of Interior Musalia Mudavadi said these measures are part of the strategies being implemented to streamline the issuance of passports in the country.
He made the announcements as he issued updates on the state of security and delivery of government services to citizens.
At the beginning of the year, the backlog of passport applications stood at 609,805, but the backlog has been cleared thanks to the acquisition of two passport printing machines capable of producing 500 passports per hour. The state also purchased one million passport booklets and recruited an additional 300 staff to the department to meet the ever-increasing demand for the service.
The accelerated processing of passports has meant that many Kenyans have yet to collect their passports, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealing that some 65,589 passports have yet to be collected from its offices across the country.
At the end of November, the Nairobi office had the highest number of uncollected passports with 30,916, followed by Mombasa (6,757), Embu (6,608), Kisii (6,130), Eldoret (6,022), Kisumu (5,146), Nakuru (3,485), Kericho (354) and Bungoma (171).
In matters of printing national identity cards (IDs), PCS Mudavadi said that the National Registration Bureau, in the course of the year, invested in two printers and live capture units to sidestep manual processes and printed 1,778,773 ID cards to clear the backlog of over 600,000 pending applications.
The government also extended the registration of 900,000 students preparing to transit from secondary school to tertiary institutions and opened 54 grassroots offices.
The Civil Registration Services opened 35 new offices and successfully deployed the Unique Personal Identifier system in Nairobi and Huduma centres effectively digitising 16 million records.
Sexual Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) still remains a worrying trend in Kenya with PCS Mudavadi that 7,107 SGBV cases have been recorded from September 2023 to December.
In three months, from August to November, at least 100 cases of murdered women were registered.
"So far, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations has completed investigations into these cases and most of them are pending before the courts. The Inspector General of Police has formed a special missing persons unit under the DCI Homicide Unit to deal with femicide cases," he said.
The Interior Ministry boss also revealed that the country’s fight against terrorism and violent extremism has borne fruit with the state security agencies managing to thwart a record 47 terror attacks for the period between January 2022 and November 2024.
In the process, several terrorists were neutralised even as the government recorded 11 successful convictions.
“Kenya has achieved commendable milestones in the fight against terrorism with the Global Index rating for terrorism showing we moved from high in 2023 to low in 2024,” PCS Mudavadi said.
Unfortunately, at least 55 police officers died between January and December 17, 2024, bringing the total sum of officers who passed one while in the line of duty in the last six years to 383 with those injured in the same period standing at 830.
The spirited fight to restore peace in the volatile North Rift under the banner “Operation Maliza Uhalifu in the North Rift” which has been beset by cases of banditry and cattle rustling has borne fruits with 250 suspects, including 14 politicians being arrested and processed.
By early this week, the Operation had resulted in the surrender of 240 firearms and the recovery of 14,598 cows. Equally, in the course of this fight against banditry and cattle rustling, some 179 civilians and four police officers lost their lives.
Illegal mining activities still remain a thorn in the government’s heel with the counties of Taita Taveta, Kwale, Migori, Kakamega, Vihiga, Marsabit, Siaya, West Pokot Samburu, Garissa, Kajiado, Mandera and Machakos being listed as notorious hotspots for this vice.
It is for this reason that the government established the Mining Police Unit to curb this trend that has seen several Kenyans lose their lives whenever their mining sites cave in on them while working.
Increased security surveillance through multi-agency collaborations at Kenya’s main airports has yielded positive results leading to the recovery of 2,540 kgs of elephant ivory, 14,457 kg of bush meat and 5.9 kgs if rhino horns. At least five suspects were arrested and prosecuted for these crimes this year.
The government has also onboarded 22,000 government services on the e-Citizen platform, something that has seen 375,000 visiting the platform on a daily basis with over 13 million users being registered on the same platform.
With this onboarding, the State closed down 1,130 paybills and created a single pay bill for payment of all government services resulting in the collection of Sh900 million daily.
Efforts to decongest prisons, including having some inmates doing community services under the watch of county governments, have seen a drop of 4,000 inmates with the number of those incarcerated reducing from 64,000 to 60,000.
“This year alone, we had 29 inmates and prison officers graduating with a degree in Law from the University of London while one graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Nairobi,” CS Mudavadi said.
In the last year, the Kenya Prison Service lost one office in the line of duty.
During the Gen Z protests in the months of June and July, civil society organisations reported several cases of police excesses in the country. These excesses, the human rights said, include the deaths of 61 people, and 72 being abducted.
However, PCS Mudavadi said that social media has in the past year, been used to perpetuate the narrative that certain lawful arrests were abductions, yet those who were arrested are either awaiting trial or have been released after the necessary legal procedures.
“Some of the people allegedly kidnapped were safely reunited with their families, for instance, the two Kitengela brothers and activists,” he said.
This assertion was however refuted by Jamil Longton, one of the Kitengela brothers, who, alongside his brother, Aslam Longton, were abducted on August 19 and released on September 19, 2024.
“How can one say that being thrown next to a river in Gachie some 50 kilometres away from our home in Kajiado, is being reunited with family? That is not a reunion. We were abducted and forced out of the public domain for a whole month,” he said.
