MORE than 40,000 passports are issued every year for Fijians travelling to foreign countries.
Ministry of Immigration permanent secretary Aliki Salusalu said they had issued 40,000 passports so far this year but had more to issue from pending applications, excluding new applications.
The growing demand, he said, had caused a backlog of pending passports.
Mr Salusalu said in the past, a maximum of 40,000 would be issued but this had not been the case in recent years.
“Over the last few years including this year, the demand has grown, surpassing the 40,000 annual applications,” he said.
Ms Salusalu said some had gone for work, migrated, education, medical or just for holidays on foreign land.
“This year, we have issued 40,000 and we are still issuing more and that means more Fijians are travelling out of the country.
“We got enough passports. So, no worries at all. We had closed off the walk in services for passports (except for emergencies) a few months ago simply because we wanted to get rid of our backlogs.
“In that seven weeks, we released 10,000 passports and then we opened up our services again for walk in.”
Mr Salusalu said they’ve had to close walk in services again, except for emergencies, at this stage to assist his team release the other applications of passport that were being processed.
Asked on reasons members of the public have not been able to make appointments on the department’s website, Mr Salusalu said they could only slot 30 appointments per day.
“So, we are waiting for the next batch of passports to arrive and when that happens, we can then increase the slots of appointments per day.
“One thing that we have realised now, there’s a lot of movements because there’s a lot of people applying for passports.”
The department will receive another 30,000 passports in January next year.
