Day 1 - A taste of disorganisation.
I have never seen the most basics of a process whereby service designed to be rendered to the general public is executed in the such an appalling manner. This is an account of my nightmare at the Ashiedu Keteke District Health Offices.
The purpose of my engagement with the office was to get a National Health ID card. I initially sort the assistance of a friend. As he worked close to the office, he offered to get the payments done for me. All I then had to do was turn up at the office early the next day, speak to a chap called Bismarck and everything else would just fall in place. My payments for the photo ID card was done on the 2nd of November. On the evening of the 2nd, my friend sent me a text with Bismarck’s mobile number. I tried calling the night before but could not get through to Bismarck.
The next morning, I was up at 5am. I had a quick shower and was out of the door by 6am. I got to the District Offices at 6.15am. There was already a long queue of people waiting. I tried ringing Bismarck but kept on getting an engaged tone. Looking carefully at the queue, there seemed to be one with just women, some slightly pregnant and some heavily pregnant. Then there was another queue with men, women teenagers and children. I was beginning to get confused. At this point, I felt the need to join the queue, but which one; obviously not the one with pregnant women. The other queue had started getting noisy. Everyone was shouting and there were a few instances where insults were being hurled back and forth. This was not looking good. I tried Bismarck’s number again. Engaged.
At 8am, one of the district office employees came downstairs. He asked all those who were pregnant to go upstairs. When the pregnant women were all gone, he then started letting 5 people through at a time. At this point I quickly went up to him and said I was here to see Bismarck. He told me that Bismarck was not in yet and that I should join the queue. I then said to myself, again “this is not looking good”. Anyway when I finally got upstairs and not knowing where to sit, I stood in a corner waiting for Bismarck to answer his phone. After 20 minutes, I gave up trying to get hold of him on the phone. When Bismarck finally arrived at work, he asked me to take a seat in the queue, this was around 9am. After studying the whole layout of the place and the queueing system, it dawned on me that there were 3 queues.
Queue 1 - Normal queue
Queue 2 - Pregnant women
Queue 3 - Civil servant, pensioners
I was in queue 3.
Another thing that I noticed was two people are called from queue 1, two from queue 2 and one from queue 3. Which means queue 3 moves slower than the other queues.
The other thing I noticed was the queue barely moves. I will explain in detail why this was happening. But for now all I could hear being shouted by those who worked there was “the network is slow, please be patient”
I sat in Queue 3 for 3 hours before being told by way of an announcement that the network had gone down and that those who were waiting for a photo ID should return the next day. Coming from an IT background, I found this to be absurd. If the network has gone down, the logical thing to do is bring it up again. You don’t just abandon work and let people go home because the network is down. There seemed to be no organization in how things were being handled. No one point has been designated to provide general information to people who required it. Everybody was asking everybody else for what to do and where to go. Total shambles. It was just unbelievable. I left that day and made plans to return the week after.
Day 2 - 10th November
Once again, I woke up at 5am, and was out of the house by 6am. I got to the Ashiedu-Keteke District office around 6.15am. I spotted a nurse at the back of the queue and asked if she was the last person in the queue. She said someone was giving tickets and the this would be a good idea if I got one. I got a ticket. I nearly cracked up laughing. This guy issuing the tickets had written them out on a piece of paper and was tearing out the numbers as people approached him for a ticket. I was given ticket number 43.
When we were ushered upstairs there was another person issuing tickets again. This time I was given ticket number 48. I started kicking up a fuss as to why I should be the 48th person as I had already been to the office the previous week and could not get an ID because the network had gone down. No one could give me a reasonable answer. I found somewhere to sit and wait till it was my turn. I must make you aware that the queueing system described earlier on was the same that was being employed. After waiting patiently for 5 hours, I decided to leave. The time was 1pm and ticket number 21 was just about to be served. The was ridiculous.
Day 3 - Today.
I had a plan. Yesterday I called my cousin and asked him to be at the District Office by 5.15am. My logic was that 5.15am was early enough for me to secure at least a position at number 5. If you are within the first 10, no matter what, you will get your ID done for you.. Anything after that, you will be hit with the “network down” syndrome.
I got to the District office at 7am and met up with my cousin. To my surprise he was nowhere near the begining of the queue. What happened? He said he got there for 5.15am but the snag was people spent the night there. Unbelievable. There was no way I was going to come back for a photo ID I told him. At 7.50am people started organising themselves in the queue. A chap from upstairs came down to open the gates. I calmly walked up to and past him. I totally ignored his presence. I went upstairs and was issued with ticket number 8. Today is a good day I said to myself. At 9.15, I was asked to step into the office where the photo ID’s were being issued. The place needed some serious organising. There was cabling all over the floor. I had my details logged into the computer and fingerprints taken. This was when the fun started. The network started to play “funny”. Yes, you guessed right. It went down. To cut a long story short, the network came back up and I finally left the office at 1.00pm. Remember me mentioning earlier on about explaining why the queue was barely moving? Well this was the reason why - the crappy network.
Looking at this on a larger scale, collectively, I would say there were 40 people from Queue 1, 20 from Queue 2 and 20 from Queue 3; making a total of 80 needing a photo ID on that day . It took 5 hours for me to be done. My ticket number was 8, you do the maths. Whiles the maths is being done, keep in mind the possiblity [very likely possibility] of people being turned away because the network has come to a halt, and will have to return the next day. Oh, and I forgot to mention, there are 5 operators [5 machines] churning out photo ID’s each working day.
This might interest you - National Health Insurance Scheme Biometric Card Wahala