14 Apr 2009 |
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Inevitably one will need something from the Nigerian High Commission, otherwise called Nigerian Embassy. I wanted to obtain the new ‘biometric’ passport, a replacement of the old, well, unbiometric one. One’s preconceptions about how things are done in the Nigerian High Commission can sometimes be as fixed and as unsmiling as one’s presuppositions about the home country itself. The litany is familiar. Oh the Embassy - as it is popularly called - is not quite playing the role of an embassy. The staff are not often helpful – they are rude and arrogant. The place is always rowdy and noisy. There is bribery and corruption. The place is not well-managed. There is nepotism and cronyism. The list may go on and on. At least before now. The complaints seem to have dwindled these days. A friend obtained a Nigerian passport a couple of years ago and he had come away impressed with the service he got. According to him, within a couple of weeks or so of his application he got it and no one had demanded any backhander from him. The picture he painted was all but perfect, so much so that he nearly nudged me into that oft-beaten path of scepticism - the usual reverse psychological reaction to such an overload of treacle. Could it all have gone so swimmingly? If he truly did not bribe anyone, didn’t anyone talk down at him? Anyway, when I needed to get a new passport, I thought here was now the opportunity to see things for myself. When I first visited there was shoe-squelched dog-poop on the ledge of the doorway to the Embassy. I began to turn my nose up, launching into a mental criticism: This is an omen, I said to myself, a sign of the shittiness of the services I might get. It was the first working day after an extended bank holiday. The inside of the Embassy was an old fishmarket of sorts, with fishwives and fishbuyers trying to outshout each other in a slanging match. No, this is an exaggeration. The open-plan floor was full to capacity, and people straggled in gangways, on the stairway, landing and lobby. But there was relative order. There was a malacoustic address system which announced names or numbers. The only high-pitched incident was a young man who got frustrated with the time he had to wait before he could even apply for a passport. He said he’d been trying since July of last year. So in December when I went to the embassy he seemed to have reached the end of his tether, and flipped. He really wanted a succulent human frame to lace his fury upon. He shouted, vented his anger, but he cooled at last. An embassy worker explained things to me. The switch from the old passport to the biometric type had caused some delay in processing and even obtaining forms. The angry guy had wanted to submit his form, but there was a document he had not included, and had been advised to go and bring it. Understandably, with the time he’d been waiting to apply and other pressing personal issues – like trying to make time to pick up his child from school – he’d lost it. I had to wait for a considerable while on the day I went because of the sheer number of people being attended to – and I didn’t arrive early. Unless I have something pressing to attend to too, sitting out a long wait is not really a problem. Not long ago I read Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed and it says something about how everyone seems to have lost the virtue of being calm and patient, the ability to wait for anything, how the word slow has finally become even far more derogatory than the older slowcoach, how the only time today is superfast time, megaspeed time. The Embassy’s modest concourse is not quite conducive to intimate reflective time really (hey, but it’s not a library), and if you need to wait for about two or three hours you might find yourself dealing with twitches of impatience. But seeing what my number was and the lag of time before I would be called, I decided to cut it fine and take a touristy stroll round Trafalgar Square and Charring Cross. I quickly took a look at Mandela’s statue, a monument that I had not had the time to observe closely since it was erected. I noticed that for some reason - or for no reason - the plinth on which it is placed is lower than those of other men in the square, it is considerably dwarfed by the adjacent, rather meridian, figure of Abraham Lincoln. Does it have anything to do with the fact that Mandela is still living? Or was this a compromise foreshortening for those who thought erecting a Mandela statue was not necessary. I crossed over to the National Art Gallery and did some speed-sightseeing of some works of art: Velazquez, Rembrandt, Goya and so on. This was perhaps my sixth visit to the National Gallery, and I had always been so pushed for time that I had never spent more than thirty minutes at a time. The collection in the arts museum is so vast that I have not even seen a tithe of works on display. I returned to the High Commission. I was called some twenty minutes after my pre-emptive return. I submitted my form and left, having been given the time I’d return to take a photograph, which is preludial to obtaining a passport. Just a couple of days later, I ran into the girlfriend of a friend of a friend who said that she had just gone for an interview in the Embassy, and that an embassy staff who had taken her form from her a couple of days before in her house, had fast-tracked her interviewed, brought it forward to the earliest date available. She said that was what I ought to have done instead of going through the chore of waiting for hours (she didn’t know anything about my visit to National Art Gallery), and having to wait weeks for my passport to be ready. She said I should have done the ‘right thing’ and get someone to facilitate it for me. She would not listen to my protests that what I had done was actually the right thing. The young woman believed it was either I was not switched-on enough to know what to do or that I was too close-fisted to square the facilitator. The latter is true to some extent. And it was not so much close-fistedness as the fact that I saw no point in giving anyone money to play middleman or woman if I wanted to obtain a passport, not even if I needed the passport urgently, and I didn’t. Then I had grown ever so slightly peeved that someone in the Embassy was taking money from people to fast-track the procurement of passports. Even if it was only one person doing this in the Embassy it would affect the waiting time of those who were doing things in the ‘unright’ - or is it upright? - way. And who really was this person? The girlfriend of a friend’s friend had told me it was a woman and that we could go to her house where she had some forms she often helped people fill in and where she would take the hefty consideration for her help, some hundreds of pounds. Since I had submitted my form, we could go there and give the fixer something to pull forward my next appointment with the High Commission. The umpteenth time, I said to the young woman that the payola would be pointless, but I realised that the years she had spent in this country had not cured her of an addiction to the bribery syndrome. So far as she was concerned, whether I needed the passport urgently or not, I should endeavour to 'see' the woman. Now I had to say a firm no, because I was no longer certain whether or not the young woman was ‘looking for customers’ for her friend. However, giving it a sleuthlike thought, I asked whether I could speak to the woman on the phone. I wanted to confirm whether there were staff in the Embassy taking money for giving out-of-duty help. When the phone was passed to me, I spoke to the woman in the Nigerian language that her name told me she would speak, to reassure her that she wasn’t being set up. She was circumspect nevertheless, she did not want to say anything to me, she whiffled about not knowing whom she was speaking to. But at last she half-relaxed, perhaps with an eye on the main chance. We haggled over the money she would take to bring the appointment forward to the next week. I told her to cut a hundred from the £350 she wanted. She refused and said, ‘my friend should have told you, that is the amount we take to do it.’ ‘We?’ What sort of ‘we’ was that? A royal ‘we’ or a ‘we’ that reflects a tradition, a modus operandi that subsumes a large number of people. Or was she working in cahoots with her ‘friend,’ the canvasser. I said I would get back to the woman via her friend. I never did. The telephone conversation has not changed my impression of the High Commission and the staff. I don’t like making categorical statements, but I think those guys are doing their jobs as best as they can. I mean there are imperfections here and there (human imperfections, if you ask me), the service I got was okay enough, it was as professional as it could be. Although someone who had applied at a different time and had had to wait longer might see things differently, for me, without having to bribe anyone, I got my passport in pretty reasonable time. And few logicians would argue that the way I got my passport - admittedly stretched by considerable red tape - is an exception that proves a shadier rule. The Nigerian High Commission is seen by many as a lighthouse of possibilities and of impossibilities, of hope and of despair - in the sea of the foreign land that is Britain it offers a beacon of sorts for Nigerians, but whether we always find what we are looking for in it is something that is still worthy of further debate. As for the woman I spoke to, I don’t know the role she plays in the Embassy, or whether she works there or not, but considering the way she spoke to me, haggling over how much she would take to antedate the procurement of my passport, the High Commission will have a hard time completely cleansing its image.
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