Baboki Kayawe
18 May 2009
The spokesperson in the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs, Lebogang Bok says the production of Botswana's first e-passports is progressing well and that they will be ready by next year as scheduled.
In an interview with Mmegi on Friday, Bok said they are happy with the level of progress thus far. A German company Giesecke and Devrient (G&D) was awarded the P120 million tender in November, 2008 at a time when Botswana has been warned by the UK and other European countries to improve its passport security features. Botswana's poor passport security features have resulted in easy forgeries by criminals.
Asked what her measure of the project's progress is, she said, "The project consultant has reported to us that they are within their action plan as per the month of May," The tender award is in two parts. The first is for the design, supply and implementation of the e-passport while the second part involves the design and implementation of the border control system. The job involves the maintenance of the system for two years.
According to information on the German company's webpage, the machine-readable passport will also have biometric features of the passport owner, which cannot be forged. "The traditional passport, which allows visual identification, has been upgraded to a platform for electronic identification based on the passport holder's unique biometric features. This upgraded document is known as the electronic passport (e-passport)."
The Ministry's spokesperson said that at the end of the project, Batswana will be informed to convert their 'passports to the new type and once someone loses it, they will have to pay P1000 for a replacement passport. "It will also take at least six months to have a replacement passport," the spokesperson added.
The e-passport and border control system tender has also seen the involvement of a local IT company, Blocks IT, situated at Block 8 Industrial as a local partner. In 2003, its owner, Monametsi Kalayamotho and a partner said to be politician Daniel Kwelagobe's son, previously tendered for the project and won but a losing bidder AST challenged the award in court and won.
However, the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Board (PPADB) later also successfully appealed against the judgement.
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