Archaic Botswana passports are a problem to SA

MONKAGEDI GAOTLHOBOGWE
Staff Writer | Tuesday June 15, 2010 00:00

But since the country changed to the high-tech system that recognises only e-passports, Batswana attempting to cross the border into South Africa with the old manual passport have been met with rejection. South African immigration officers are equally frustrated because the old Botswana document is not machine-readable.Processing it manually is a long operation.

At the Tlokweng/Kopfontein border post, the Mmegi team finds agonised faces as they painstakingly put old Botswana passports through computers. They keep calling for help from one another as the machines fail to read the info in the outdated documents.

The 'advice' often comes that to succeed, the passport should be held at a certain angle. When even this doesn't pass muster, another officer steps forward to try another trick. The laborious process - one page at a time - takes up to 15 minutes and easily an equal number of muttered curses.

Little wonder. It begins with passport holder asked to strip the usual hard cover from the document so that it may be scanned from back to front. By contrast, it takes hardly a minute to go through the 'stamp and dispatch' formalities on the Botswana side.

'Yes, it is very hectic using the old passports because the computers need a lot of information from the pages,' says a South African immigration officer at the Kopfontein/Tlokweng border gate who gives her name only as Kgarebe. 'Sometimes they require that we scan four pages or more.

The Mmegi reporter decides to go through the formalities with his decidedly passe document to test the system for himself. It takes so long the officer in charge has to ask a colleague to help.

Kgarebe says from next month, her staff will give preference to Botswana e-passport holders because South Africa long communicated to Botswana authorities that it intended switching to an electronic system from June.

Yet Botswana authorities insist the archaic document will remain in use until 2011! This inspite of the near stampede at the Department of Immigration in Gaborone last week as hundreds of anxious manual passport holders attempted to acquire the e-passport!

A good number were people eager to travel to South Africa for the World Cup for which they had tickets. In any event, who wants to wait until 2011?