MAKING UGANDA WORK

To collect your passport you are directed to the former Face Technologies offices in Kyambogo. A compound seating on more than an acre.

“Oh My God!” I gasped at the queue that started at the gate down to the bottom of the compound, along the perimeter wall and back up again to the entrance of the collection office across the compound on my right. There were easily a thousand people lined up and I had just arrived for my noon appointment.

My first thought was that, standing in that line was not an efficient use of my time, where efficiency is work done per unit time. My second thought was since I was here I better grit my teeth and get on with it.

Ordinarily I don’t mind waiting, I normally have a book on hand and the more I wait the better.

But I couldn’t read because I was thinking about the state of affairs that got us here.

A week prior, at the Jinja road offices of Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Control (DCIC) I wondered aloud to the officer interviewing whether there wasn’t a more efficient way of doing this, than have hundreds of people seat around for hours.

"She explained with suppressed annoyance, that the process would be smoother if people honoured the time of their appointments, but pointed out too that 90 percent of the people waiting did not even have an appointment for the day and were occupying space of the genuine appointment holders...

The process is you fill an online form—and exponential improvement from before. That process is complete when you pay for the passport – new or renewed and are given an appointment time and date. Days after you get a message, giving you another appointment to collect your passport from Kyambogo.

In a room of a thousand people in Kampala, I would ordinarily know one or two, a function of age and profession. I stood in line for three hours and I can honestly say I never saw anyone I knew.

Easily 99 percent of my fellow collectors were young people, mostly women. When I asked, they told me most, if not all, were looking to add to our labour export numbers. I believe governments should not restrict the movements of its people, but that being said, I think it is an indictment on the government and on Uganda as a whole that we cannot keep these young people gainfully employed at home. Especially since they are going to do menial work abroad they would not be caught doing here.

Industry as a driver of growth is so 20^th century – the breweries for instance, employ fewer people per bottle of beer produced than they did in the 1990s, but factories would be a good start. I have always argued that the most natural place to start for us is with agroprocessing. We are currently ramping up production which is useful, because believe it or not, except for coffee, milk and a handful of other crops, we do not produce enough to sustain a viable agroindustry sector.

"You also want your youth to remain in the country because they are the drivers of innovation. Older people, like me – I really felt old waiting in line, are set in our ways, it’s the youth who think things can be done better, dream the impossible, unhampered by experience and obsolete knowledge and who, if given a chance, make it happen.

We need to stop seeing them as individual units of unskilled labour and more for their potential as a generation that will make the difference in the future about whether this experiment called Uganda, will prosper or not.

After three hours on my feet, I got my passport. I should have jubilated and celebrated but I quietly slunk out of the area, a nagging feeling that someone might call me back and take it away from me. There would be a fight.

The officials at the DCIC were courteous and helpful, a far cry from an official – in another country, almost 40 years ago, who after a sip of his Fanta (DCIC officials do not eat at their stations) told me to go and wait at the border for the renewal of my student’s permit – a story for another day.

But you have to think, for a ministry that is top heavy with military Generals, things can be better.

A few years ago while in a check-in line at an airport somewhere in Europe, a Caucasian man wheezed past us, pausing only to swipe his phone and breeze through the gates to the departure lounge. When I asked, I was told he had an app with all his details, that allowed him to swipe over a sensor and complete his process in a blink of an eye, leaving the rest of us backward travelers in the analogue line.

I am sure such technologies are available widely now. But if that is too much to ask, my analogue solution would be to have the passport office work 24/7. It would call for more manpower and jump in allowances for staff, more inefficient than newer technologies, but there must be a way to ensure a Ugandan’s right to a passport is not a nightmare to acquire.