Opposition MDC Secretary-General, Chalton Hwende has been forced to explain the acceptance of diplomatic passports by MDC legislators after the party had said that that the passports needed to be rejected since they were not a priority to the country.
The Herald contacted Hwende over the issue after reports suggested that some MDC legislators including Hwende himself had already received the passports. Hwende said:
That is neither here nor there (whether he has a diplomatic passport or not). When I speak, I speak on behalf of the party and my statement was that the priority should be on issuance of ordinary green passports because there are people who are genuinely in need of those passports.
So whatever foreign currency we have it should go towards printing of those ordinary passports
This is consistent with his Twitter post which noted that the country had to prioritise issuing passports to ordinary Zimbabweans considering that there is a backlog which dates back to 2018. He tweeted:
Our statement was very clear currently there is a huge crisis with the backlog in issuing passports to ordinary Zimbabweans. We always put people first and our directive is that ordinary Zimbabweans be given the first preference since there is an acute shortage of passports.
More: The Herald