Passports of Zimbabweans who have applied for the documents are ready for collection, the Zimbabwe consulate in South Africa said on Wednesday.

"We are currently dealing with applications from Gauteng and will go to other areas in the country at a later stage," spokesperson Chris Mapanga said.

However, if people who have applied for the passports in areas outside Gauteng needed the documents urgently they could collect them from the consulate's office in Meadowdale, Johannesburg.

Mapanga was responding to a statement earlier issued by Passop that the consulate would allegedly not deliver passports to applicants outside Gauteng and that there was a deadline for people to pick them up only at its Johannesburg office by Friday, April 8 - despite some people having applied in various provinces across the country.

"Passop remains extremely concerned about the Zimbabwean government's failure to deliver passports to its citizens in South Africa.

"The many thousands of people who applied and paid for passports in Cape Town and other parts of South Africa should be able to collect their passports where they applied," spokesperson Langton Miriyoga said in a statement.

"The Zimbabwean consulate cannot withhold passports from its citizens who paid for these passports, and it has an obligation to deliver passports in line with the promises it has made," he said.

Mapanga said people who had applied for passports outside Gauteng were a small number and the consulate would go to their areas at a later stage to deliver the passports.

He said people should visit the consulate's website on www.zimbabweconsulate.co.za to check if their passports were available for collection.

Mapanga said the consulate put up a deadline date for people in Gauteng to collect their documents because some had not been fetching them. He said the passports would still be available for collection after Friday's deadline.

The deadline was set to encourage people to collect their documents, especially because the consulate was also planning to relocate its office later in April to another area in Johannesburg.

Details of the move would be posted on its website soon, Mapanga said.