For the past few years, cases of passport fraud have been rampant in Malawi. A number of foreign nationals have been intercepted at the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services trying to acquire the Malawi passport fraudulently.
The Malawi passport— ranked 8th on the list of most influential and powerful passports in Africa by London-based global immigration consultancy firm Henley & Partners firm—is much sought after by foreign nationals because it offers relatively strong travel freedom compared to other African nations, providing visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to over 70 countries, including in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
With this in mind, the increasing cases of passport fraud should be a source of concern to the country. Passport fraud erodes national security by facilitating serious transnational crimes such as human and drug trafficking, human smuggling and financial crimes such as bank fraud and identity theft.
Additionally, a country known for having insecure or easily forged passports suffers reputation damage, leading to a loss of international trust and potential difficulties in securing international cooperation and support.
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In Malawi, a passport is issued by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services (DICS) with the National Registration Bureau (NRB) providing evidence of Malawi citizenship through national identity cards. However, the relationship between the two institutions, where one is a civilian institution and the other a security institution, is what has created a security loophole through which fraudsters are using to get the Malawi passport. These fraudsters know that once they manage to get the national identity card, then chances are high that they can easily get the Malawi passport as well.
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Just recently, a Burundi national was convicted by the Lilongwe Magistrate Court for furnishing false information to the National Registration Bureau, contrary to Section 43(a) of the NRB Act, and making a false declaration for a passport, contrary to Section 327 of the Penal Code. In 2019, a Nigeria national was reportedly intercepted at Berlin International Airport in Germany as he tried to enter that country using a Malawi passport. All this is an indication that it has been easy for fraudsters to acquire the Malawi passport due to a weak screening system at NRB.
NRB was created in 2017 to, among other things, provide national identity cards to bonafide Malawians as evidence of their citizenship. The bureau proves Malawi citizenship through documentation, witness testimony, parental identification, biometric capture and traditional leaders. However, the bureau arguably lacks the necessary skill to detect false information because documents can be doctored, parents and witnesses can be created and traditional leaders can easily be corrupted to provide false information to help someone get the national identity card. That is why the majority of foreigners who acquired the Malawi national identity card fraudulently have ended up being intercepted at Immigration as they tried to apply for the Malawi passport.
This is not to say the creation of NRB was a bad decision altogether but measures could have been made to ensure that its officers are well trained to prevent fraudsters from accessing the national identity card. That is why placing the issuance of national identity cards into the hands of a security institution such as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services could have made much more sense because the department already offers citizenship services to foreigners wishing to acquire Malawi citizenship and Malawians wishing to renounce their citizenship for a different nationality.
What the government ought to have done was simply amend the Citizenship Act to give the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services the mandate to issue national identity cards as well, instead of creating a new body, to ensure that the issuance of both the national identity cards and passports is done by one security institution, as is the case with other African countries such as Zambia, Namibia, South Sudan and Gambia, just to mention but a few.
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Already, the department has district immigration offices and plans to open more offices, alongside the Mlambe One-Stop Centre, where such services could be provided from.
In conclusion, a secure passport application process is key to preventing identity theft, fraudulent travel and document forgery by ensuring that personal, biometric data are accurately verified and protected. All this cannot happen if the national identity card acquisition process is too vulnerable to fraudsters.
