OPINION: Pissed off trying to process my national identity card

To say that I am pissed off is an understatement of the year. Here I was in my native village, Chalowe, in the now Wanging’ombe district, Njombe region, where I spent most of my early life, revisiting nostalgically my childhood, as a young African boy.

I must admit that I was indeed having a good time. Reliving my adventurous early life, including snaring tiny birds for my breakfast and crunching sweet and juicy sugarcane pieces freshly cut from the water-logged valleys below the village ridge.

And from time to time I would sip some chilled bamboo wine ‘ulanzi’, stored in a calabash nearby and collected from the adjacent evergreen bamboo clusters. In a nutshell I was peacefully enjoying this serene village life uninterrupted by the thrill chirpings of tropical birds piercing the clear and fresh air. Then it happened.

From the TV set at the far corner of the room there was an urgent announcement to the effect that come May this year all sim-cards from our ever present mobile phones will have to be renewed or rendered useless. However, the renewal would only be possible on production of the national identity card from NIDA, the national agency handling IDs.

We all know that presently life can never be easy without these tiny gadgets, the mobile phones. I therefore decided that I had to necessarily follow-up on my national ID’s application. And in due course I left my serene village life in Njombe for Arusha, where a year or so earlier I had registered for the ID. And that is when my problems began.

At the registration office in Njiro, where a year earlier, I had spent some torturous six hours queuing to register, I was told my card was yet to come. I was advised to check with the NIDA offices.

Now being a smart and modern scribe – by my own standards – I decided to open the NIDA website to find out how I could process the same. Here I was directed to a page where I could fill in my enquiry and e-mail it to the relevant offices.

I wanted to know about my Card, or if not possible be provided with a number as advised, which was also acceptable to the authorities renewing our mobile phone sim-cards. This I did. That was two weeks ago and there is no response to date.

Upset I decided to use the mobile numbers *152*00# as advised by NIDA website. The immediate response was that, the request could not be processed as my phone did not have enough funds, 100/- to be more precise. What an insult! I was now becoming ‘hyper tensioned’. I repeated the exercise five times, and on the fifth, a brief note came back saying taarifa za usajili hazijapatikana – information on my registration is not available. My anger was now bubbling just beneath my thin skin. I then realized there were four or so phone numbers listed on the website to handle all enquiries on the subject. I tried them all, and there was no response from all of them.

Totally pissed off I stormed into a nearby pub and guzzled down my throat several lagers before wobbling my way home.

And as I write this third rate column, I am totally pissed off and worse for wear, the latter, on account of the many lagers still fermenting inside my dehydrated body.

Now I do understand why the Chief Bongolander, President Magufuli himself, had to intervene and extend thesim-card grace period to the end of December this year before all our previous sim-cards are rendered useless. NIDA wanted the deadline to be May. And I thought NIDA would have been the one requesting the extension of the grace period in appreciation of their shortcomings and bureaucratic inadequacies. But no! I have a strange feeling that NIDA wants me, and many other Bongolanders, to be thrown out of the mobile handsets’ wagon. They want to drive us back to the dark ages where drum-beats were the available form of communication. Well! We will see how all this ends at the end of it all.