Interior Ministry warns on unclaimed Congo passports
The Ministry of the Interior and Decentralisation has issued an alert concerning passports that have been produced yet remain uncollected. According to information attributed to the supervising ministry and relayed by local media, the phenomenon concerns nearly 4,000 documents that are still awaiting their owners in the administrative services where they should ordinarily be retrieved.
The ministry’s accounting, as reported, places the precise figure at 3,719 Congolese citizens who have not collected passports already established in their names. In the ministry’s framing, these are not pending applications but completed travel documents, described as remaining within different administrative offices rather than being placed in the custody of their rightful holders.
Data points: cases dating back to 2002
The reported lists underscore how long some documents have remained in storage. Three unclaimed passports are said to date back to 2002, one to 2012, seven to 2019 and sixteen to 2020. The same ministry-linked information suggests that, from 2021 onward, the number of passports not collected began to rise year after year.
In editorial terms, these dated entries are significant for two reasons. First, they indicate that the issue is not merely administrative congestion linked to a single period but a phenomenon that, at least in a small number of cases, has persisted across multiple years. Second, the gradual increase after 2021 points to a change in the scale of the problem, inviting attention to the operational chain that runs from enrolment and production to notification and final collection.
2025 paradox amid the passport shortage claims
Within the ministry’s count, the year 2025 stands out: 556 citizens reportedly did not collect their passports during that year. The same ministry-linked account notes a paradox: in 2025, the so-called “passport crisis” generated numerous public demands, yet a substantial number of completed passports nonetheless remained unclaimed.
The ministry’s concern, as reflected in the communication relayed by the press, is therefore not solely about volumes, but about coherence in public service delivery. If demand is high while completed documents remain in offices, the gap may lie in information flows, appointment systems, travel constraints, or changes in personal circumstances—factors that can affect collection even when the underlying need for a valid travel document is strongly expressed. At the same time, prudence is warranted: the figures indicate the fact of non-collection, but they do not, on their own, establish the reasons behind individual cases.
France: Paris biometric enrolment and planned expansion
For Congolese nationals residing abroad, the text highlights a diplomatic track intended to facilitate access to biometric passports. In France, since 15 March 2018, Ambassador Rodolphe Adada reportedly obtained a pilot centre allowing on-site enrolment in Paris for the issuance of biometric passports, reducing the need to travel to Brazzaville for the process.
The same source indicates that the new minister-counsellor at the Embassy of the Republic of the Congo in France, Armand Rémy Balloud-Tabawé, acting in agreement with his hierarchy and relevant services, plans to extend enrolment branches across the wider consular jurisdiction. The stated rationale is practical: immigration services prioritise passports that are valid, and decentralised enrolment points may better align administrative capacity with the day-to-day realities faced by diaspora communities.
Governance lens: securing documents and improving collection
From an institutional perspective, the reported ministry alert can be read as a dual message. It is, on one hand, a call to citizens to complete the final step of a process that culminates in the handover of a sensitive identity and travel document. On the other, it functions as an administrative signal: unclaimed passports represent a management and security issue, as well as a measure of service performance, since each document produced but not delivered is a process left incomplete.
Based strictly on the reported elements, the immediate policy question is therefore less about production volumes than about the effectiveness of the delivery channel. The ministry’s tally provides a baseline for monitoring; the diplomatic initiative in France suggests an effort to bring services closer to users. The shared objective is to ensure that legally established passports reach their holders in a timely manner, strengthening both administrative credibility and citizens’ capacity to travel with compliant documentation.