LAST WORD
On Dirty Data
O
chieng was casually perusing the
newspaper in the evening sitting
in his favorite ‘LazyBoy’ in front of
the television when he saw the article that
Kenya was introducing the e-Passport and
that all current Kenyan passports would be
invalid from August 31st 2019 irrespective
of their stated expiry dates.
This style of operation is so typical of Kenya
officialdom where proclamations are made
daily that criminalize old behavior without
explanation, the article did not explain what
was an e-Passport or why it was suddenly so
important that it needed a deadline.
What would appear as a sane approach to
the issue was to start issuing e-Passports
to new applicants and to those that needed
renewal as the document costs money and
it is not fair for someone to have acquired
a passport in 2018 for ten years for it to
become invalid in one year.
Ochieng, being cognizant that the Kenyan
government has never been known for its
clarity with communication to the public,
took all this information in stride and
decided to renew his passport just to avoid
the last minute rush as is the practice in
Kenya.
That is when the drama started, what was to
be a simple and straight forward exercise
soon started a chain of events that soon
was to convince Ochieng that either the
government is myopic or it simply is
careless and/or incompetent.
As a responsible citizen Ochieng duly
informed his many relatives in the diaspora
that they needed to acquire the e-Passport
before the deadline otherwise they could
find themselves stateless and stranded in
the domicile countries of choice.
Barely two weeks had passed when a
flurry of WhatsApp messages began to be
sent to Ochieng from frustrated relatives
who were asking him where he had got
the information from since the Kenyan
embassies did not seem to have the
information.
Ochieng asked a friend who worked near
the immigration department to kindly pop
into the immigration offices and verify that
the information that he has communicated
was true and it was confirmed that what
he indeed had communicated was true.
However, and this was the catch, they were
unable to offer the services abroad since
they did not have the equipment to capture
biometric data abroad. What the Kenyan
government was telling its citizens is that
E-Voting did not save us from the she-
nanigans of claims of stolen elections
and certainly we could not access the
servers to settle the dispute. Is it because
we had no rights of access or is it because
the data was tampered with? Could that
become the fate of the Huduma Namba?
they needed to come to Kenya physically
to get the e-Passport.
This means that on September 1st
2019 there are thousands of Kenyans
who shall wake up holding an illegal
document that was acquired legally
and interestingly many of them will be
abroad and will have to incur the extra
cost of travelling back to Kenya to get
the mandatory new e-Passport.
What is amazing in all this is the fact that
the government is capable of holding a
press conference asking its citizens to
acquire a mandatory document from
official channels and fail to inform
those that are charged with providing
government services.
Ochieng, now thoroughly curious about
the new passport, decides to actually
apply for the new document, after all it
is just a matter of replacing an analogue
passport with a digital one and the
article had said the new passport would
take two weeks to acquire.
Since the Kenyans government now
prides itself on being an e-Government
that little exercise should not be too
exerting. Ocheng’s effort to access his
e-Government account to apply for
the e-Passport proved futile as he was
unable to log in. The government server
was congested.
Responding to his irritation on not being
able to get through, a friend helpfully
informs him that the best time to apply
would be at night when the traffic is
low. And sure enough Ochieng was able
to access his account at night and to
proceed with his application.
Ochieng could not help but wonder
94 MAL29/19 ISSUE
how Wanjiku was coping with this. The
government has quite rightly so ensured
that you cannot apply and pay for a
passport manually supposedly to curb
on corruption and we do know that a lot
of passports were sold by unscrupulous
Kenyans to illegal immigrants. So how does Wanjiku apply for her
passport if she cannot access the server
during normal working hours? Ochieng
soon found out that there is a host of
mobile cyber cafes that offer the service to
Wanjiku, at a fee of course, and help her
navigate the application.
More interestingly,
why does an adult
Kenyan holder of
an identity card
require a recom-
mender? Ochieng
can understand a
witness, legal doc-
uments do some-
times require a
witness, but a rec-
ommender sug-
gests that there
are Kenyans who
are more import-
ant than others. These cyber brokers will get you all
the necessary documents including a
recommender which compromises the
whole purpose of ensuring the integrity of
the person you are issuing a passport to.
Are these brokers the ones jamming the
system to create work for themselves?
But more interestingly, why does an adult
Kenyan holder of an identity card require
a recommender? Ochieng can understand
a witness, legal documents do sometimes
require a witness, but a recommender
suggests that there are Kenyans who are
more important than others.
This immediately raises a moral question,
are there Kenyans that are guardians
to other adult Kenyans and on whose
recommendations other Kenyans can get
passports. Does a particular profession
predispose one to being more honest and
straight?
Ochieng felt affronted by the fact that
Kenya still has latent colonial mentality
that used to have fathers called ‘boys’ to
ensure that they were constantly reminded
that they had a superior white boss. If
one is not responsible enough to have a
passport without a recommender, they
should not have an ID.
Ochieng manages to get into the
e-Government at night, thanks to the fact
that he has internet at home and soon
realizes that it is not simply exchanging an
old passport for a new one but actually it
is a fresh application for a new passport.
Anyway he begins to fill the form and
realizes that the standard form has been
altered and they have added new fields
in order to capture more data. Ochieng
reaches the part that now requires one to
input a birth certificate number.
The last time Ochieng saw his birth
certificate was over thirty five years ago
when he was applying for his first passport
and surely the immigration department
have the copy in his file and it is irritating
that the field is mandatory as he cannot
proceed.
A home search for the document he
had only used twice, to get his ID and
to get his passport yields no results, so
he abandons the application to search
for his birth certificate and cannot even
remember if he ever had it or he returned