THE Department of Immigration has implored Parliament to push for the resuscitation of its computerised citizen management system which has been down since December 2019.
The system is used to capture the movement of travellers,
screen those with outstanding security issues and those with travel bans.
In 2014, the organisation computerised some of its offices
at border stations and airports to enhance service delivery.
It is also operating an online visa application (eVisa
Zimbabwe) processing system in line with the country’s e-Government project
aimed at modernising and improving service delivery in the public sector.
The Assistant Regional Immigration Officer in charge of
Beitbridge, Mr Nqobile Ncube last week told Parliamentarians from the Committee
on Defence, Home Affairs and Security that the state of affairs at the borders
was a cause for concern.
He said in the absence of the system, the Department was
screening travellers and segregating information manually and at times this
depends on the work ethic of individual officers.
Additionally, Mr Ncube said the job became tedious
considering that prior to the lockdown they were handling at least 14 000
travellers daily.
He said the numbers could even increase further when the
land border finally reopens to passenger traffic considering that many people
within Zimbabwe and the region have not travelled for the last six months.
“The Afrosoft backed system that ran the Citizen Manager
Program on a LAN (Local Area Network) capacity has been down since 8 December
2019,” said Mr Ncube.
“This puts the Department, security and basically the whole
nation at risk as all entries and migrant management has to be done from a
manual perspective.
“Given the high-volume movement at this port, this becomes
a great disadvantage in terms of efficiency and quality delivery. I would like
to request for the Committee to lobby for Cabinet or even a Presidential
oversight into this matter such that by the festive season this year we trial
and run an effective and robust operating system that ideally would be
real-time.”
The senior immigration official said having their
computerised system on the WAN (Wide Area Networks) will help them carry on
board the Interpol module like South Africa and Botswana Immigration Services.
In addition, Mr Ncube said the system has the capacity to
be packaged with the neo facial recognition module being currently piloted and
other related immigration services modules.
He also encouraged the Parliamentarians to push for the
Ports Authority Bill to be promulgated as this will bring alignment of services
and fair utilisation of resources across the Board.
“The current set up where the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority
(Zimra), who is also a stakeholder at the border, are given the maintenance and
repair budget for the whole complex is untenable as obviously most of the
expenditure will lean towards the interests of Zimra at the expense of other
departments.
In the absence of the arbitrator role of the Port
Authority, this creates a Big Brother element in the purse holder and relegates
other departments to minions who have no administrative say in the management
and development of infrastructure and services. This, in my view, needs to be
dealt with urgently,” said Mr Ncube. Chronicle
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