Home Affairs Minister Kazembe Kazembe has told Parliament that the government is only issuing burial orders and death certificates at the moment due to COVID-19 regulations.
The failure to access the documents such as passports, birth certificates and National Identity cards has brought a lot of challenges to many.
Without an identity card, it is difficult to prove your identity in Zimbabwe as the government is currently on a manual system.
Answering a question in the National Assembly on when the government will resume issuance of the documents, the Minister said they are making plans but currently giving death certificates and burial orders only.
“Yes, indeed the government is concerned like everyone else is equally concerned that citizens should get their documents as and when they require them. We are in the process of coming up with a strategy – in fact, what has been happening of late is that due to COVID, we have not been operating the full throttle.
“We were only issuing burial orders and death certificates but as soon as lockdown is lifted we will be able to start processing birth certificates starting with those that are at the top of the list coming towards the current requirements,” he said.
The Minister added, “Going forward Mr Speaker Sir, we have a program that we are working on which I will be very much pleased to share with Honourable Members after it has passed through the necessary stages.
“We are working with the Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education to try and computerise our operations, to try and improve our efficiency so that it makes life easier,” he said
According to Minister Kazembe, there are many strategies that the government is working on to try and ease the situation.
“To be honest Mr Speaker Sir, there are a number of issues which we were attending. The first one being that of consumables for passports and we are attending to that one.
“There is also another issue without beating about the bush or skirting around the subject, we also have the issue to do with the corruption that we have to deal with.
“That we have to deal with and the solution or mitigation is computerisation to remove the human interface between the client and the service provider. So we are working on that Mr Speaker Sir.” Get more Covid-19 Stats from CovidZW.info
