Passport applicants on Thursday went on the rampage and threw stones at the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services office in Lilongwe in frustration of delayed processing of the travel documents.
In the course of their riots, the protesters broke windows of nearby buildings and vehicles parked in the vicinity.
The protesters also barricaded the road that passes near the Immigration office with stones, preventing vehicles from accessing it.
A video clip, whose authenticity we verified, shows a hoard of protesters pressing forward onto the office while throwing objects against the building.
When The Nation crew arrived at the scene, the atmosphere had calmed down following police intervention.
The Police Mobile Service officers were seen dragging awoman they thought was a suspect.
“We have been here for weeks and we haven’t been served. We are angry and the riot is a strong message,” said an applicant, who asked for anonymity.
An eyewitness, who sells carbonated drinks at the Immigration office premises, said he had to run for his life after observing commotion break among the crowd that crammed the facility.
“It was really tense. I feared for the worst,” he said.
Meanwhile, Immigration spokesperson for the Central Region Patrick Msume confirmed the fracas, but said they are yet to establish what happened.
“What has been damaged and what triggered the chaos, will form part of our investigations,” he said in an interview.
O n t h e o t h e r hand, National Police spokesperson Peter Kalaya said he was not aware of the development.
He referred The Nation to the Central Region Police, whom we did not get hold of by press time.
The riots come a week after the Anti-Corruption Bureau pounced on some Immigration staff and agents at the Lilongwe office over bribery allegations.
The office is characterised by long queues of passport applicants largely blamed on a system break down that resulted in suspension of passport printing earlier this year.
President Lazarus Chakwera blamed the crash on cybercrime. The system was restored but it was only in Lilongwe where passports were being printed.
A fortnight ago the department announced that operations have also resumed in Blantyre. However, it later emerged the headquarters in Blantyre was only processing applications and not printing passport booklets.
Minister of Homeland Security Ken ZikhaleNg’oma is on record as having said that the department was printing 500 passport booklets per day.
The bottlenecks in processing passports date back to December 2021 when government cancelled a $60.8 million (about K103.3 billion) Techno Brain contract due to alleged poor handling by the former governing Democratic Progressive Party administration.
In April this year, the government engaged E-Tech Systems, a Malawian firm, as the new passport system supplier.
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