Middlemen thrive on inefficiency
A recent warning by the Immigration Department cautioning passport applicants to avoid using middlemen that loiter around the department’s offices only makes sense to those who are ignorant of the department’s extreme inefficiency.
Some of us, who realise that the middlemen are a product of the department’s inefficiencies, only wonder why the department is wasting time issuing such a warning instead of dealing with its disorganisation.
If the Immigration Department always had adequate stationery for printing passport application forms, no sane applicant would bother to seek such services from middlemen.
If the Immigration Department produced passports within the agreed period of time, no applicant would be bribing anybody to help them get their passport on time.
If only the process of applying and paying for a passport was not as cumbersome—where an applicant has to spend hours on a queue to just get their face photographed and pay the application fee—applicants would not have any business with middlemen who are somehow able to cut through the long process.
And maybe if the Immigration Department’s staff were a bit friendly, to just have time to respectfully and patiently explain simple procedures to sometimes ignorant applicants, the applicants would not have anything to do with the seemingly friendly middlemen.
But when you walk towards the gate of the Immigration office in Blantyre, for instance, you see crowds of people sitting hopelessly under a tree shade.
Some of them have travelled long distances with the hope of collecting their passports only to be told that they are not ready without a further explanation from the office yet at this time the agreed period within which a passport must be produced has elapsed.
Without the much-needed explanation from the passport office, the easiest source of hope becomes the middleman who promises to help the applicant to get the passport within a few days.
At the office’s door stands a guard who seems to enjoy treating people like idiots. He is an angry man who assumes that everybody who walks to the office knows what procedures to follow, when this is obviously not the case.
When you ask him for an enquiries desk, he tells you to ask him whatever questions you have. His dismissive answers can be embarrassing as they are overheard by people standing in a very long queue behind him, waiting for their turn to get inside the passport office to just pay the application fee.
If the department thinks the guard can double as security man and an inquiries desk officer, the least it can do is to give him a few customer care tips. No human being wants to be disrespected, especially when all they want is to just get a passport; that’s why a respectful middleman sometimes becomes a viable option.
So, Immigration bosses, before you start pointing fingers at middlemen, take time to observe the suffering that your offices subject passport applicants to. Only then would you be able to understand how your offices’ inefficiency has made the middlemen thrive at the expense of the poor man.
