Malawi's passport system has ground to a complete standstill — leaving desperate applicants stranded without travel documents for a full week, as ageing machines break down and booklets run dry.
The Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services has produced not a single passport in seven days, insiders claim, plunging travellers hoping to go abroad for work, study, business or urgent medical treatment into limbo.
Sources close to the department say the crisis boils down to one thing: equipment that simply won't work.
Among the litany of faults: a malfunctioning laminating unit, passports mistakenly printed in duplicate, and — perhaps most alarming — biodata printed on entirely the wrong page.
As if that wasn't enough, the electronic chips embedded in the passports themselves are reportedly glitching, throwing yet another spanner in the works.
And when the machines do work, staff are running out of the booklets needed to print on in the first place, with materials shortages compounding the chaos.
Some officers, speaking anonymously, even turned their fire on the software running the show — branding it clunky and blaming it for hold-ups even when the hardware is functioning perfectly.
The meltdown is a bitter blow for a system that was supposed to be the answer to Malawi's passport woes, having been rolled out specifically to speed things up and banish years of delays to history.
Despite repeated attempts to get answers, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services had failed to respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.