Kenyan Passport renewal woes

A family member applied for a passport renewal 6 or 7 months ago and it just came back.

It used to be easy to just send the passport to a relative back home, get a stamp on it and have it “Fedexed” back. This time though, we sent it through the embassy.

The embassies are so disorganized it’s unbelievable. We had to send another application when the first one could not be found “because of what is happening in Kenya”.

Word of advice; the best thing to do now, from our experience anyway, is to send it with the “diplomatic bag”, i.e., through the embassy, but let someone follow it for you immediately in Nairobi. This way you have some form of accountability built in at every level with minimal risk.

The risk with sending it directly to someone in Kenya is too high. Relying only on the embassy alone to make sure the process moves along can also be frustrating and time-consuming, but it works with a little jabbing and pushing. This is the best combination we have found and it has worked more than once. The way things are, passports with visas on them have become hot commodities in the black market so you want to make sure you are able to “track” it from day one.

After several broken promises by the embassy, we had to get someone involved in Nairobi. They told us that we should be getting it in 2 weeks from the time we contacted them. Sure enough, the embassy called almost 2 weeks to the letter and told us that they had mailed the passport to us.