A few weeks ago, I had to travel to Kigali
on an assignment. It is usually a fairly uneventful thing – present your
passport at JKIA, go through immigration, and get on a flight that lasts
slightly longer than an hour. This time, though, I decided to conduct a little
experiment. We have been reporting for months now that East Africans (at least
from the ‘coalition of the willing’ countries – Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda) could
travel to each others’ countries using only an ID card. I hadn’t actually seen
this in action – except in the obligatory photo ops by Presidents, so I decided
that it would not be a bad idea to test rhetoric against practice.
To my pleasant surprise, it actually worked
flawlessly. True, when I first presented my identity card to the immigration
officer at JKIA, it was like asking for an item that is rarely ordered on the
menu. He handled it with aplomb, though. The process is a simple one – the
officer fills out a ‘Hati Safiri ya Jumuiya’ (Interstate Pass), which is a
simple card that details your name, nationality and ID number. You then get it
stamped at the back and off you go. You have to retain it until you are back
home, but it easily is the most painless thing I have ever had to do when
travelling out of Kenya.
Now, all this time, I had my passport
tucked away in my satchel, in case I was being overly optimistic, but it turns
out I shouldn’t have bothered. Even in Kigali, where the officials squinted a
lot more suspiciously when I presented the ID on departure, it turned out to
not be a problem, and off on my merry way I went.
I am usually the biggest sceptic of most
government initiatives. They tend to be long on bombast and grandiloquence, and
painfully short on actual delivery. Witness all the statements, initiatives and
operations that have been announced to root out corruption, deal with traffic,
and reduce crime and terrorism. They have all floundered on the shoals of the
usual politicisation, incompetence and sheer inertia of a bureaucracy that is
unused to delivering service.
There are some corners of the government
that have been a pleasant surprise, however, and it would be remiss of us to
continually hammer the government without recognising these rare bright spots.
From everything I have heard, the
immigration department is beginning to let air into what has been a fusty,
musty, dark department. While we still haven’t heard the full story, and dealt
with the consequences, of terrorists and other undesirables being granted
Kenyan passports, the experience there has become one of positivity, and a
service charter that is largely being adhered to. I’ll confess that I’m
actually in the process of testing it out, seeing as I have just applied for a
replacement passport, so this assessment might change soon.
And the immigration department is not fully
off the hook, by the way. I once had to ignore a sweating, sneering, sniggering
foreigner who assured me that he would be served at the ‘Kenyans Only’ desk at
JKIA, and I had to live down the embarrassment when he was duly attended to,
foreign passport and all. I doubt the lecture that the officer had to endure
from me is one she will forget in a while, but it is such a galling thing that
the department needs to sort it out before it causes an international incident.
Despite our constant carping about the
police, individual officers are acquitting themselves well, despite having to
work in the most trying of circumstances. These are ladies and gentlemen who go
out of their way to deal with distressed victims of crime, or to simply push
stalled vehicles off the road. This does not, in any way, excuse the bulk of
the force, or the systems and structures that mean the police are working at
cross purposes with the values of the country. This still needs a
root-and-branch overhaul, and urgently, before the police service in Kenya
becomes a fully corrupt, predatory force.
Back to that ‘Hati Safiri ya Jumuiya’. The
business elite among us may simply look at it as a convenient way to not fill
up one’s passport too quickly. But there are some to whom this will be a
life-changer. Small traders who cross borders every day no longer have to apply
for passports and travel passes. Students can go back and forth between
countries without having to deal with stifling officialdom. Think about it: in
a few years, at this rate, we will no longer have to even have a ‘Hati Safiri’
filled out; we can just flash a smart ID at airports and border posts. A few
years after that, there may no longer be need to have internal borders within
East Africa (if the Tanzanians and Burundians ever got up to speed, that is).
Call me a starry-eyed optimist, if you
will, but finding a government initiative that works as advertised is so rare
that I can be forgiven my paean of praise to the denizens responsible. Worry
not, though, my hectoring scepticism will be back here next week.
Also published in the Business Daily on 12 August 2014 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Believe-the-hype---you-can-fly-to-Kigali-without-a-passport/-/539548/2415762/-/11vf5muz/-/index.html
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