Common sense is the antidote to inefficiency

Jul 01, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur Sports – Our public service still does business today with an attitude that says: this is how it is, and therefore this is how it must remain. And this attitude is the source of much public frustration when accessing public services.

The truth, of course, is that many of the things we complain about in public service are not complicated technical failures. They are, more often than not, the result of systems that simply need tweaking and management that needs to remember a very radical idea: the public is not an inconvenience interrupting the work of government. The public is the reason why government exists.

This may sound obvious, but so did the idea that you shouldn’t smoke in an elevator, and yet here we are.

There was a time where there was a notice in the passport office forbidding the use of cellphones. Not “please silence your phone,” not “avoid disturbing others,” but a blunt prohibition, enforced with the kind of seriousness usually reserved for smuggling contraband.

If you so much as glanced at your device, you could be treated as though you were trying to coordinate an international terrorist act, rather than informing your aunt that you might actually still be alive after three hours in a queue. The message, whether intended or not, was exquisitely clear: you are here at our discretion.

That sign was never really about phones. It reflected an administrative worldview in which public servants were not, strictly speaking, servants at all, but custodians of a scarce and slightly mysterious favour called “service,” which might or might not be dispensed depending on what side of the bed the staff woke up that morning.

This mindset, of course, did not arise overnight. It emerged in an era when accessing public services required either extraordinary patience, knowing someone who knew someone that knew someone whose cousin once worked in an office adjacent to someone with a stamp. You did not simply apply for a passport; you embarked on a minor pilgrimage involving early-morning queues, and the existential gamble of whether today was your day or merely your rehearsal for disappointment.

People would arrive at dawn —4 a.m., sometimes earlier—not because they were enthusiastic about administrative efficiency, but because they understood a simple arithmetic: scarcity plus uncertainty equals sleep deprivation. And even after surviving the queue, there was the elegant possibility that one might be told, with bureaucratic serenity, that the quota for the day had been filled. Please try again tomorrow. As though tomorrow were not also made of time, distance, transport costs, and mounting fatigue. For those travelling from far-flung areas, this was less an inconvenience and more a practical demonstration of how distance can develop a personality disorder.

There has been, to be fair, been progress. Decentralisation efforts under the APNU+AFC nudged things in a better direction. But things, as they often do, slipped back into the old inefficient routines because of the inability to adapt to increasing volumes in demand for passports.

Then President Ali intervened personally. This resulted in a more humane and functional passport process. The revelation was almost embarrassingly simple: if you change the system, increase the staff allocation, and adjust the attitude, things improve. One could almost hear the collective gasp of discovery: Wait—you mean management matters?

Applying for a passport over the past few years have become a breeze. And yet, like all good systems, progress is never a straight line. Today, the passport process is generally efficient—until it reaches the final act, the uplifting of documents.

Between 1 and 4 p.m., the public gathers. Most people arrive just before the commencement time for distribution, which means the waiting area quickly becomes crowded. Then someone comes out with pile of documents and begins calling names. The persons whose names are called are then directed to another section of the waiting area, to be ushered into another room where they will uplift. It is not an efficient system at all.

The solution to this conundrum does not require algorithmic reinvention. It requires what one might call common sense. It requires a separate building for uplifting passports. It requires a long counter with three or four wickets/ windows, arranged alphabetically. Window 1: A – F; Window 2: G – L; Window 3: M – R and Window 4: S – Z

You arrive. You go to window related to the first letter of your surname. You collect your document. And you leave. It is as simple as that and avoids you having to sit and be shuffled around from seat to seat like schoolchildren. It avoids someone having to come out and call out names and then you having to be shuttled to another room.

Improving public services does not require futuristic governance. It requires, fundamentally, a shift in attitude towards management. Governance, at its most functional, is based on accountability. The public does not exist to accommodate the system. The system exists to serve the public. Not grudgingly. Not ceremonially. Not as a favour. But as its primary reason for being.

And once that shift in mindset occurs, most of the “impossible problems” begin to look suspiciously like solvable ones that have simply been waiting for someone to notice they were never impossible at all.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• antidote, Common sense, inefficiency, Peeping Tom

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