You would have to be stone-hearted not to be deeply moved by the following story that appeared as the tailpiece to deputy editor Lawal Ogienagbon’s column for this newspaper on July 26, 2018.
Titled “Agony of a dad,” it captures the lack of compassion, the cold application of rules that admits no exceptions even in the most compelling of circumstances, with which the bureaucracy in Nigeria is shot through and through.
At the center of this tale is a distraught man whose wife and only daughter suffered hideous burns in the Otedola Bridge tanker explosion of June 28. He had spent N4 million on fees in a private hospital in Lagos where they were receiving treatment before he transferred them to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) in Ikeja, Lagos.
Persuaded that they could receive yet better treatment abroad, he sought to fly them out. Money was apparently no problem. The problem was that his daughter’s passport had expired. To get it renewed, officials said, he would have to take his daughter, third-degree burns and all, to the Passport Office for electronic capture of her biometric data.
That was the law, they told him. There was no alternative.
That was the story the distraught man took to an assembly of transport operators convened by the Lagos State Ministry of Transportation at the Bagauda Kaltho Press Centre at the State Secretariat at Alausa, Ikeja, to figure out the actuarial implications of the disaster and their responsibility to the victims.
The crowd listened in hushed silence, the tension heightened, I gather, by the distraught man’s refusal to disclose his identity or to have his photograph taken.
He was not asking for financial help, the distraught man. He was there to solicit Governor Akinwunmi Ambode’s help to move the Passport Office to take their equipment to LASUTH for the biometrics, since it was not possible to transport his daughter there in her condition.
The Commissioner for Transportation, who stood in for Ambode at the session, asked the distraught man to see him privately after the meeting.
I do not know how the meeting ended. I hope the Governor acceded to the distraught man’s request, and that his wife and daughter are now abroad receiving the kind of treatment they could not get in Nigeria.
Ordinarily, the distraught man should not have found it necessary to seek Governor Ambode’s intervention. The supervising officer of the Passport Office should have been vested with discretionary powers to waive, in exceptional circumstances, the law mandating a passport applicant’s physical presence for biometrics. Plus, the equipment is portable and can function just about anywhere there is an electrical outlet.
But in Nigeria, nothing is ever ordinary.
The system operates on the assumption that exceptions will be abused. Therefore, it admits none, not even on the most compelling of reasons. To render the system impermeable to corrupting influences, they enact rules that drive frustrated patrons to the criminal embrace of syndicated hustlers operating a parallel system that delivers quickly, and with the minimum of fuss. You pay the fee, and you get the document – almost any document — and it is just as good as the one issued by the bureaucracy.
But because the system admits of no exceptions, patrons are forced to devise all manner of schemes for obtaining whatever services they require. And the more unlawful, the more assured.
Apparently the distraught man, bless his innocence, had never heard of “Oluwole.”
The whole thing is self-defeating. Government loses vital revenue and erodes citizens’ faith, shaky at the best of times, in the system. Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world to require a passport applicant’s physical presence for biometrics, an anomaly in this age of information technology. But the requirement has done little to curb the fraffick in Nigerian passports
The United States Passport is probably the most valued in the world. To obtain it, you have to sign the application form in the presence of an official; yet, it remains the world’s most trafficked travel document.
The point is that the kind of stringent controls I have been describing rarely work.
Yet, illustrations of their application abound in Nigeria.
Issuance and renewal of drivers’ and vehicle licences should be routine. But the officials vested with the authority have insinuated so many obstacles into the process that motorists and vehicle owners are often forced, after an interminable wait, to seek these documents from touts who care nothing about driver competence or the condition of the vehicles plying city roads and inter-state highways.
The high volume of road accidents and the mounting death toll are attributable, at least in part, to the ceding of this vital function to touts, by the very officials entrusted to safeguard it.
To ensure that nobody can vote at multiple centres, restrict movement on Election Day from home to voting booth and back, shut down the airports and seaports, lock down the country, and virtually place the population under house arrest.
Otherwise, some people can vote in Lagos in the early morning, drive to Abeokuta to vote two hours later, fly to Kano to vote around lunchtime, hop to Makurdi to cast yet another vote, and land in Port Harcourt just before the polls close. And they can do so in numbers large enough to subvert the popular will.
The loss to the economy from this misapprehension is incalculable. I say nothing of course about the disruption to arrangements long made, contracts long sealed, and to the rhythm of life.
To take an example from the banking sector: Because of the high level of money laundering and other syndicated crimes in the system, depositors are required to obtain a Bank Verification Number (BVN) that will help officials keep track of customer transactions. To obtain the BVN, depositors have to report in person at banks or designated centres to register, within a specified period.
Patrons who fail to furnish the BVN before the deadline have been warned that they stand to forfeit their deposits, on the presumption that they are money launderers. No account is taken of the inconveniences, the costs, and the risks to which depositors residing in far-flung places have to subject themselves to register for the BVN.
And yet, all manner of technological tools are available for verifying the identity of depositors in the comfort of their homes, or without requiring them to travel far from wherever they live. When banks and other institutions fail to avail themselves of these technologies, they unwittingly retard Nigeria’s digital advance.
Consider, finally, the matter of policing the country. It is feared that if each state is allowed to run its own police force, as is the case in every federation, the force will be used to persecute the political opposition. That has happened before in Nigeria, and could well happen again.
But instead of making laws to curb and punish such abuse, constitutional provision is made only for federal only. Now, is the unified police command not often used today to persecute political opponents? Or is it the case that persecution by the federal police is to be preferred to persecution by state police?
Even in the best-ordered societies, laws, rules and regulations will be abused. That is a fact of human society. But since they are made for people and not the other way round, they must admit of exceptions, and must be executed with compassion and empathy.
It used to be said that Compassion and Empathy are Africans. It is time to reclaim them in the making of public policy.
Correction
In my column for August 14, I mischaracterised the PDP as the majority party in both Houses of the National Assembly of the Second Republic.
That status belonged to the NPN. The PDP did not exist then.
I regret the error.
