There is need for culture change at the department

Judge Mbadwa,

The Nyasaland Immigration Department has been in the news for right or wrong reasons, my lord.

I wouldn’t want, at this stage, to talk much about the merit of hiring a retiree or an insider to run the organisation though I feel Lazaro brought on himself the present entanglement. 

You are bound to ask: Were the advisers snoring on the job when such a decision was being made?

But one thing is clear. There is a lot of rot at the department whose genesis cannot be attributed to just the issue of leadership.

The problems being experienced at the department date back to the dawn of the multiparty era when politicians captured the institution after realising that they could make a killing through it.

The average employees, after noting how the top brass with connections to the political elite were living a more than comfortable life because of underhand dealings, joined the bandwagon by pouncing on poor passport seekers and others.

The system created a culture that encouraged corruption of need where one had to bribe their way through any service they received from officers if they wanted to be assisted with speed.

If you are without a name and have not experienced the trauma that people go through to access services at the department, you must be the lucky one. It is not usually a pleasant experience but one is left without a choice in most cases.

And usually the service provider treats its clients as if it is doing them a favour but perhaps that sums up the whole service delivery fiasco in Nyasaland.

Ask those people who have been forced to spend days on end at any of the department’s offices for a service that can be rendered within 10 to 15 minutes— how they have been referred from one office to another without really getting some joy because they don’t understand the language the officers speak when one wants to be assisted speedily.

My lord, I know there are some hardworking and honest and efficient officers, who have a heart to serve the citizens and I have good friends, too, who do their best but the honest ones are outnumbered by the majority bad apples.

Instead of rewarding the honest and hardworking ones, the systems somehow decorated moles that encouraged a culture of palm-oiling of officers.

There is a need for a complete culture rest at the department if we want to see meaningful change. The department needs to institute reforms as soon as yesterday. But who would be willing to institute the reforms knowing how deeply entrenched the system is?

As I did argue before, my lord, the Immigration debacle has also exposed the gross inefficiency which, if analysed, is aggravated by people who benefit from the chaos that is generated.

It has always been my submission that some chaos is deliberately created and shortcuts emerge when people want to beat the chaos.

If somebody really cares about bringing sanity in the issuance of passports, the first step is to reduce the time people spend queuing for a service or waiting for some officers to endorse an application.

I am waiting to see how this drama will end though for now we know the retiree is facing an uphill battle to remain at the helm.