OPINION: Legislation on travel documents needs urgent revisiting

I accepted an invitation to Dodoma a fortnight ago to join the array of stakeholders who showed up before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Constitutional and Legal Affairs.

I was invited to give their views on some parliamentary Bills to amend certain Tanzanian laws. As is always the case, most stakeholders had received copies of the Bills, went through them and proposed amendments highlighting certain law sections that were of concern to them.

I realized that Parliament quite liked submissions that clearly presented possible texts in lieu of the clauses complained about. Also, organizations and individuals who had prepared written recommendations stood a better chance to influence lawmakers than those who presented proposals verbally from the podium.

Unfortunately however – for what I consider as lack of a keen eye for detail – a lot of the views related to one Bill. In other words: only about four presentations out of the 500 submissions in all focused on Bills other than the ‘Political Parties (Amendment) Bill, 2018!’

The four presentations included those made by the Tanzania Network of Legal Aid Providers (TANLAP), Tanzania Citizens Information Bureau (TCIB) and the African Centre for International Affairs (ACIA).

The trio’s submissions had sections – albeit scant – on the Miscellaneous Amendments Bill No. 4, 2018 which included sections seeking to amend the Tanzania Passports and Travel Documents Act, 2002.

The proposed changes therein were very progressive, and it was shameful that so little attention was paid to it. No wonder the Standing Committee dropped that particular part until enough attention can be mobilized from the Tanzanian public.

Since the Miscellaneous Amendments law was passed without any of the sections of the progressive Passports and Travel Documents Bill – and without the knowledge of hardly anyone – I will devote these few paragraphs to highlight the main propositions of the deferred law that seeks to alter the conditions for issuance, control and cancellation of travel passports and related documents.

For instance, due to a factual upgrading of the Department of Immigration and its chief executive officer, the law needed to recognize the promotion of the head of the Department from a mere ‘Director of Immigration Services’ to a ‘Commissioner General of Immigration Services.’ It is sad that, with its withdrawal, this cannot be anymore!

More fundamentally, the Bill under Section 8 (2) (a) proposed an amendment to Section 2 to give appropriate interpretation of the ‘Minister’ referred to therein. The Act’s use of the word ‘Minister’ should change to imply the Minister responsible for Matters relating to Immigration and Citizenship, instead of Home Affairs as currently implied.

This was such a good development – considering that there are times when the minister for Home Affairs is not necessarily responsible for Passports and Travel documents.

For lack of public support to the proposed bill, this also had to fail – which is also terrible!

Two more Sections proposed progressive change. First: an expansion in the list of typologies of Passports. While the existing law recognizes the issuance of passports only in manual booklets, the Bill upgraded the law to also recognize electronic passports of the future – given the move that’s already under way to digitalize the Tanzanian Passport.

It is a pity that the process could not garner enough support. I bet the Tanzania Immigration Services must have been dismayed by all this. Section 3 (2) (d) sought to amend Section 3 of the principal legislation by adding to the list of passports a new category of passports.

This was deemed necessary to accommodate the introduction of a new category of diplomatic passports meant for top brass officials of our country. Sadly, this has also failed to sail through.

In the new category of diplomatic passports, stakeholders suggested that the Controller and Auditor General (CAG) be added – given his position and status in Tanzania.

The withdrawn part of the Miscellaneous Amendments Bill denies Tanzania of progressive developments. These include the freeing of the passport from proof of travel abroad; the requirement that diplomatic passports must be relinquished at the end of one’s service tenure; and the shift of the age ceiling for applicants requiring parental consent from 16 to 18.

It would also have been a good opportunity to legally recognize the African passport following its launch in Kigali, Rwanda, on July 16, 2016, and plans to roll it out for use across Africa by 2020. Unfortunately, the Bill’s withdrawal keeps the African passport outside Tanzanian books.

More of the contents of the withdrawn Bill shall be analyzed in detail in the next edition of this column.