Monday, January 03, 2005

How to get a Zimbabwean passport

Having just recently spent an extraordinary amount of time over three days in various queues at Harare passport office trying to renew my passport I thought I'd share some of the information that it would have been useful if I'd known before starting :-)

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There are two ways to renew your passport at Harare passport office, depending on whether you are normally resident in Zimbabwe or whether, like me, you have a work permit/residence permit somewhere else. The approach is completely different and even some of the paperwork is too. I'll tell you what I know about each approach. As is always the case with these things, there are no guarantees about the accuracy of this information (it changes with the wind) and your mileage may vary.

Forms

The first thing you'll need is a form. You have to buy this and at the time of writing they were going for ZWD 5,000. If you're trying to get a form at Harare passport office you'll need to take your existing passport, birth certificate and ID (national registration) card with you. You need to queue outside window 7 (count from the right hand side as you face the passport office). If you're outside the country, you can get the form from the nearest Zimbabwean embassy where they'll charge you some exorbitant amount in the local currency.

Read the form carefully! The first thing to note is that you have to fill some bits of it in in person at an embassy or passport office — you can't submit it by post.

Paperwork

You'll need the originals and a photocopy of each of the following documents:

• Birth certificate
• National registration (ID) card
• Renunciation certificate if you've ever held a foreign nationality — note that this is the document issued by the Zimbabwean government and not the one from the foreign government.
• Old passport — photocopy the first three pages if it is an old style passport, the last if it is a new.
• Marriage certificate if you are a married women.

There doesn't appear to be a requirement that the photocopies are certified as they check them against the originals at the passport office. That said it is probably safer to get them certified by a commissioner of oaths before you go.

You also need two colour passport photos of the right size. Don't stick these to the form, they'll do that for you.

If you're trying to replace a lost or stolen passport you need a letter from the police showing you've reported it. The letter should have an official stamp and contain the passport number of the missing passport as well as your full name. Go to window 8 (labeled lost passports) to get authorization for a new form.

If you're an "external" you also need the original and a photocopy of your foreign residence permit as well as a letter stating when you're due to return to your country of residence. This can be in the form of a copy of a ticket, although write a cover letter to go with it.

The "normal" approach

The normal approach (i.e. for people living and applying in Harare) is to trundle down to the passport office at some ungodly hour of the morning and stand in the queue outside the main gate. The gates open at 07:45 so you need to be there before that — earlier is probably better.

Once the gates open you'll be visited in the queue by a passport officer who will number and initial your form. This number is your place in the queue and people are served in order. If you don't have a number the standard response is "come back tomorrow".

You proceed from the gate and queue outside the actual building. People will try to get in numerical order so find out who is in front of and behind you. This queue moves in blocks of twenty or so and eventually gets you into room 87 inside the building. Room 87 is a waiting room that surprisingly holds about twenty people and allows you into room 89. This is where things happen.

One of the passport officers in this room will process your paperwork. You might be sent to office 100 to get your citizenship verified. This involves getting a stamp on your form and coming back to room 89.

Once everything is in order the passport office in room 89 will tell you to go and pay the cashier in room 3. Make sure you get a receipt and then take your completed forms to room 4 (or wherever the cashier tells you to).

After the requisite waiting period (which depends on how much you pay, see below) you'll have to come back and collect your passport, which you do from window 9 outside the building. You'll need your old passport, your receipt and your ID (national registration) card.

The "external" approach

If you're an external you have a number of options. One is to do everything outside the country through an Embassy. This only works if you have all the requisite paperwork at your disposal at the time. If you chose to try through an embassy there is an extra form to fill in — a declaration stating how long you've been out of the country from. The embassy will supply this.

If you don't have everything you need you can get a fair way through the process (as far as filling in the forms and getting them validated and authorized) and then courier the documents to someone in Harare to complete at the passport office. This is the approach my sister took.

You can also start from Harare which is the approach I took.

In either case, the most important part of Harare passport office for you is window 6. This is the "external" window and you'll queue here many times. Things are first come, first served and there are no numbers. The queue is short but moves very, very slowly. Expect it to take an hour or more to move the distance between one window and the next.

The process seems to be as follows:

1. Queue at window six to get authorization for a form
2. Queue at window seven to get a form
3. Fill in the form and gather the required paperwork
4. Queue at window six with the completed paperwork which will then get validated.
5. If you've held foreign citizenship you might be sent to room 100 to get your citizenship validated, after which you take your forms back to window six. Make sure they stamp your form in office 100 or you'll be sent back there.
6. You sign the form in front of the officer and have your fingerprints taken.
7. Someone authorizes your application **
8. You go to the cashier in room three and pay some money. How much you pay depends on what your letter says about your return date.
9. Once you have a receipt you return to window six where you hand your application in
10. You wait n working days
11. You queue at window six with your receipt, you ID (national registration) card and your old passport to collect your new passport.

It seems as though stages 1-7 can be done from an embassy (at least it worked for my sister). You can also theoretically pay at the embassy (stage 8) but this doesn't always seem to work so well. My sister paid £90 at the embassy in London only to find that when her application was submitted in Harare they wanted another ZWD 350,000 to process it. She ended up paying twice for the same thing (one day turnaround).

If they can't do the authorization bit at an embassy because you don't have the complete paperwork and they're not going to stick the photos on, make sure they stamp the back of your photos or the person submitting for you won't be able to submit them.

The authorization in stage 7 in interesting. It appears that for most people this involves the person behind the counter peering at your photo and then peering at you and then stamping the form. In my case, perhaps because I am a pale male, it was a bit more complicated. I was told it'd take one working day to get authorization, which surprised me as everyone else in the queue was done on the spot. When I got my form back it came out a separate pile and had an extra stamp on it that no-one else I spoke to had. The stamp read "President's Department, PO Box 2278, Harare. No Adverse Security Trace". Perhaps I look dodgy?

It appears that you need to queue at window six to initially hand over your form with all the paperwork for them to check and again when collect your passport. At all the in between stages it seems expected that you'll push to the front. This is probaby reasonable as the other stages are normally quite quick. People will nevertheless bleat about your pushing in.

Costs

The normal cost for a passport at the moment is ZWD 30,000. This entitles you to a passport some time in the next three months.

If you're prepared to pay more you can get things quicker. As far as I can tell, anything up to a seven day turnaround is just a matter of paying the appropriate fee. If you need things quicker than that (they offer a one day service) you need to get an urgent application approved in room 8 before you pay the cashier.

This isn't entirely the case for external applicants — the external window can grant you up to three days turnaround. If you want it in a day you need special approval.

The fees I managed to take notes of were as follows:

Form: ZWD 5,000
3 Months: ZWD 30,000
7 Days: ZWD 225,000
3 Days: ZWD 300,000
1 Day: ZWD 350,000

There are other options between three months and a week but I didn't note them down. They'll probably have changed next week anyway ;-)

Take the turnaround times with a pinch of salt. One day means one complete working day so if you submit on Monday it'll be ready on Wednesday morning if you are lucky. Sometimes things end up in the wrong pile and people get irate about not getting the service they pay for. This happened several times during my various stays in the queue.

Office hours

Harare passport office works from 8am to 3pm Monday to Friday except on public holidays. They close for lunch between 1pm and 2pm. The only notable exception I found was the urgent applications office (room 8) which is only open from 8am to 10am daily.

Of course I made the mistake of going close to Christmas. People took off early to do their Christmas shopping :-) I had to come back tomorrow. And tomorrow. And Tuesday.

Phone a friend

Some parts of the passport application can only be done in person, others can be done by friends/relatives. My experience is that you can get someone else to queue and get a blank form for you if they have a copy of your ID (national registration) card. They write your name and ID number on the form to stop it being used by someone else.

You have to submit the application in person. That is, you have to be there in person so the passport officer can check that you look like your photo and you have to sign the form in front of them. This doesn't appear to be negotiable.

Once your form has been authorized and stamped it looks as if someone else can do the rest (i.e paying, submitting and collecting). This is what happens when people start the process at an embassy and complete it at the passport office.

Anything involving a third party requires that you write a letter of authorization. You need separate letters to allow someone to submit and application and to collect your new passport. The most important thing is that the signature on the letter looks like the one you signed on the form. They will peer at this closely. Whomever goes on your behalf will be asked to produce their ID (national registration) card and the number will be noted on the form.

Note that even if you send someone else to collect your passport on your behalf, they need the original old passport. This is because at the point at which they hand over the new passport, they cancel the old one. You're apparently not allowed to hold two valid passports at the same time ;-)

Update: 2005/01/04 16:45
Bongai pointed out that I'd missed the two "lifeline" options ...

1. Call a friend: In Zimbabwe it's not what you know but who you know.
2. Ask the audience: Pay some dude who is hovering around the office, who can do it ten times faster than you.

So what's 50/50? Your chances of getting your passport when you expect it perhaps :)

posted by guy at: 18:52 SAST | path: /general | permanent link