Redirect to finance

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

I DON’T think one can cut and paste a government digital platform. That is, importing digital terminology, boasting of your “common digital portal,” “seamlessly” connecting government ministries and departments, of connecting “e-Government” with citizens, when you have not the corresponding competence and technology. And when the Minister of Finance calls for brownie points from your ministry, when budget season hits, sending him a list of splendid imaginary digital services.

When you do so, the citizens find you out. They see, feel and experience that you are fake. Faking digitality.

At 19, I began working at the Population Programme Division (Ministry of Health), at the old wooden colonial warehouse block, opposite the Financial Complex on lower St Vincent Street. My job at Population Programme was to stick stamps onto National Insurance Cards of employees of the Ministry of Health. I had a two-hour course of instruction. There was backlog, I was always hustling the job, at times I was unsure if I was sticking the right stamp denomination to the right card. I went on sticking anyways.

I became friends with a senior employee of the division. When I got my monthly pay ($300), he told me to separate the goat from the sheep; and I traipsed behind him to a rowdy bar on Duke Street. I remember bounding down the wooden stairs of the warehouse office, like a gazelle, only to encounter the CEO coming up, jolting me like a buckshot. It was office hours.

I next worked at the Elections and Boundaries Commission. First at the head office on Queen Street (the year of the Guardian fire), then at the St Ann’s sub-office next door, then at Mon Repos and Carib Street in San Fernando. One day the CEO of the commission saw me reading DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow at my desk. He did not scold me. He politely advised my “superior,” a young woman who had joined the commission a few months before me, that she should have better directed me.

The old tall yellow wooden building next door was relatively hot with action. Drama. It was the regional ID Card office. Serving citizens from Barataria, San Juan, Morvant, Laventille and St Ann’s. I worked at the front desk. It was standard practice to tell citizens to come back – over and over again. Your ID not ready. We still verifying your info. Or to point out some technicality, real or imagined, why an ID could not be delivered. Sometimes a citizen would revolt, creating harum-scarum.

I remember once attending to an elderly woman. I did not have the guts to tell her to come back. I left my desk, bounded down the stairs, rushed across to the head office next door, verified her details in the electoral card binder, and rushed back to serve her. Make it a one-stop shop. However, the department head was sitting at the back of the office. He saw me. He complained that I failed to do verification, and I had rushed across to cure my delinquency. He misinterpreted my action. Making the office into a one-stop shop was unimaginable to him.

There are currently 24 government offices, including the Office of the President, in Trinidad. I have been to 23 of them. As a clerk (Service Commissions), a teacher (I worked at three secondary schools), as an activist. And recently as a potential pensioner.

The Ministry of Social Welfare gave me two stamped letters to go to the Ministry of Education and NIS, Port of Spain, to certify that I was not, or would be collecting pension, gratuities, or severance from these entities. The officer in the Education Ministry’s lobby informed me that the clerks who could assist me were on lunch. I waited. After lunch, he made a telephone call upstairs. I was in the wrong place. I needed to go back to Social Welfare, let them “redirect the letter to Finance.” “Which Finance?” I enquired. The downstairs officer did not know. I asked him to call back the upstairs officer. “The Financial Complex,” he was told. So, I had to go back to Tunapuna? Yes.

Luckily, luck was with me. A gentleman from upstairs, in a chance encounter, told me to go behind the Education Ministry, to Treasury. I went to Treasury and got my form signed in ten minutes. At the NIS on Queen’s Park East, I was told that the letter was misdirected. I had to go to a local NIS office. “You sure?” I pleaded. Yes. Misdirection upon misdirection upon misdirection.

A common digital platform may be defined as, “Service delivery within government, as well as between government and the public, using information and communication technologies… Traditionally, government services have been delivered in person, by individual departments in different locations, and often using paper forms. With digital services, government can deliver information and services to citizens anytime, anywhere, and on any platform or device” (Granicus).

Untrained staff, delinquent practice, misdirection from staff, failure to pick up phones or respond to e-mails, and inter-departmental and inter-ministry dysconnectivity, fragmentation, are characteristic of government services, abusing the unsure, ill or elderly. Even if government were to establish a proper common digital portal, it would be compromised by poor professional staff practice. E-Government will earn an F-fail if there is not established professional training for aspirants for government service; and correspondingly a civil service examination.