I arrived at the registration centre which thankfully was just 5 minutes walk from me. I overheard the Registration Officer, tell someone that around 11am, the machine's battery "died" and they had to wait for 2 hours before someone brought them a spare from Head office. I shook my head in amazement. As if that wasn't bad enough, the officer responsible for keying-in the bio data of each registrant seriously needed to have had a 4 week course in keyboarding! His handling of the computer keyboard showed how unfamiliar he was with it, and his slow tying (with just 2 fingers) slowed down the whole process. I wondered if these people were serious!
Typically the registration centre opens at 7am and closes at 6am however, the officers began to educate us on how the timing that had been announced on both the radio and television announcements, were incorrect. The centres were to close to the public at 5pm in order for them to count the number of registrants as well as write their operational reports etc. What irked me even further was their insensitivity on allowing 9 of us who had been there for over 2 hours to just register, especially as it was 5pm as the lack of a spare battery had attributed to the snail pace of the registration.
The registration officer made the mistake of bellowing out loud that it was 5pm and that we should all go home. Now anyone who knows me would tell you I am not the sort to start an argument or quarrel but honestly my tolerance at the whole display of their lackadaisical attitude set me off. I shouted back saying we will not go home until we had been processed. She looked at me in surprise as I had been well behaved throughout the time I was standing in the queue. I then repeated my response and she looked back at the officer who was filling out the forms and chuckled. In local parlance she told her colleague, she was shocked at how I had said we were not going to go home, until we had been processed. So in return the officer filling out the forms said she had seen me standing in the queue all this while and she thought I really did deserve being processed. So the 9 of us were all allowed to go through the process and indeed we got our cards. The rest of the people who had queued up behind me were told to return the following day. I certainly was not going to give up until I had gotten my Voters ID and in the end I did. For a simple process, they had made it complicated. In my view, they need to do the following:
- have move than one person assisting with the form filling
- have a more competent person on the computer
- when there is a backlog of persons in the queue, the other officers should assist instead of sitting around doing nothing.
I really do hope they get a greater part of the population to register, as this exercise would then have been a waste of taxpayers money.
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