The goro boys or middlemen are not to blame for the woes at the passport office. Singling these people out for whatever is happening at the passport offices is a bit misplaced, with the greatest of respect.
Your Ministry must be held accountable for whatever you saw at the place. Sacking these goro boys or their collaborators is not the solution to this worrying phenomenon.
Much as systems have been built to take care of these matters, there exists teething challenges which continue to plague the swift acquisition of passports.
Your people are refusing to adopt the needed practical solutions and measures to address the long delays applicants endure in their acquisition of passports.
How can one apply for a passport, given six months to come for the biometric exercise and wait for extra six months before the passport gets to him?
If there is a different route to acquire this same passport but at a relatively shorter time frame, naturally, people would use that route albeit the exorbitant price charged for same.
If your outfit (Passport Office) speeds up these processes as excepted, trust me, the goro boys or middlemen would naturally leave the scene.
You may have sacked or reshuffled the existing staff at where you visited, it will not take more than two weeks for this phenomenon to rear its ahead once again.
As long as the processes for passport acquisition remain cumbersome and tedious, and takes forever to complete it, there will always be goro boys around.
Imagine a businessman desiring to renew his passport in a month in order to travel outside the jurisdiction for an important function, and the person would have to wait for a year to get his passport renewed, how would he navigate such a calamitous situation? Goro boys would welcome him and in a week, he gets sorted.
All the bottlenecks that have been militating against the swift acquisition of passports must be removed. If they get removed, there would not be any need to reshuffle or change your staff because the middlemen would be a relic of the past.
The loopholes are in existence because your Ministry has paid little attention to the happenings in that section of your department. The backlog of passports needed to be printed for people who applied and went through the processes run into thousands. Do not blame goro boys, Dear Minister.
The solution lies with you, Honourable Minister. Get the measures adhered to by your staff, improve the speed for acquiring passports and all other things would work just fine.
P.K. Sarpong,
Whispers from the Corridors of the Thinking Place.
Richard Koomson| mediacentralonline.info |Ghana
kindly send us your stories on our WhatsApp line 0500004727
