I wrote this article almost a year ago following my rather debilitating experience with Ghana’s passport office. For some reason however, I never got round to send it off for publication for a number of reasons until this morning when I read Jasmine Arku’s article (http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/Wandering-Thoughts-Can-t-we-manage-our-passport-aqcuisition-process-too-382419). What you are about to read is an attempt to tell my experiences in applying for a Ghanaian passport, but looked at from the perspective of a transport planner. Admittedly, and perhaps against the very canons of my professional background, the article is interspersed with my own personal emotions (and understandably so), a limitation I admit, even though I apologise not for those limitations.
In a 2008 study, the World Bank’s Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) found that the investment cost of meeting the targets for Africa’s transport infrastructure needs (under a base scenario) amounts to about $209billion or some 3% of Africa’s Gross Domestic Product annually over 10 years from 2006. Significantly, about half of this amount is needed for the maintenance of the existing stock of infrastructure. This, coupled with rapid urbanisation in Africa and a general squeeze on the fiscal purse means that there is a need for a radical rethink of the strategies Africa (in general) needs to be adopting to arrest the massive deficits in its transport infrastructure. A corollary question then is, what opportunities exist in the existing (transport) systems in African countries to help address the increasing problems posed by our transport systems in Africa’s largely urbanising cities and rural communities? In this two-part article, I shall be looking at some of the ‘overlooked’ approaches and/or opportunities available to dealing with the traffic menace of Accra using my passport application as a unit of analysis. I shall start with the opportunities I saw in applying for a Ghanaian passport following a recent name change.
To give a background, in London when I changed my name in 2012, all I needed to do was to take a 5 minute walk from my house to a solicitor’s office. There, the solicitor asked for my old name, the new name, and my address. My swearing of an oath to that effect followed this. Within a matter of minutes, I was out of the office with a ‘Statutory Declaration’ showing my name change. In the comfort of my home, I then called all companies and institutions (Banks, employer, Inland Revenue, utility companies etc.) I have dealings with to inform them of the name change. In most cases, merely informing the organisation over the phone of the name change was enough but in some cases, I had to follow up the phone call with the posting of original copies of the Statutory Declaration to some of the organisations. Within a matter of days, my name change had taken effect . . . no qualms, no stress!
Contrast the above with my experience in Ghana in doing same. As my (Ghanaian) passport was still valid until 2015, I didn’t feel the pressure to change the passport. But when I travelled to Ghana in October 2014, I thought this was a fine opportunity to not only get the name change effected on my passport but to also obtain Ghana’s widely-talked-about biometric passport since I couldn’t get the biometric passport done at Ghana’s High Commission in London ( so I was made to know). What followed is the raison detre for writing this article to explore the opportunities that exist in our existing systems which could potentiate our capacity to address some of the challenges we face in our urban transportation systems especially in Accra and Kumasi.
I learnt (from a cousin) that to apply for my passport, I needed to purchase a form from one of the banks in Ghana. I used ECOBANK. At the bank, I found the queues rather too long and literally busting at their seams. There were people either depositing or withdrawing huge sums of money. As a transport planner, I was set thinking and asking myself many questions;
1. How many people are here in this branch to deposit money and how many are here to withdraw?
2. How many people are here to buy passport application forms?
3. How many people are here to do Western Union Money Transfer or other related transactions?
4. How many people are employed in this Branch and how did they come to work?
5. How far do these employees live from their place of work?
In the transport planner’s parlance, analysing these questions amounts to analysing people’s ‘travel behaviour’. Suffice it to say that I saw a number of opportunities at the Bank that we could explore to significantly help reduce the nagging road traffic in our urban centres. Without a doubt, the proliferation of banks and other financial institutions in Ghana is a phenomenon that cannot go unnoticed by any interested eye. Conservative estimates currently put the number of banks in Ghana to about 30. In this large number of banks lie a number of opportunities to change people’s travel behaviours. Firstly, we still have a system where people travel several kilometres from places like Kasoa and Adenta to work in the Central Business District of Accra. Interestingly, for those working in Banks, most of them drive past several of their (Bank’s) branches to the branch where they work. Without a shadow of doubt, this does not do any justice to the traffic situation in the capital. In other contexts (and this is not always the case), what happens is that at the recruitment stage, people are allocated branches/sites based on their areas of residence. For instance, if River Island (in London) were recruiting, they will be looking to assign Mr A to say their Oxford Circus branch if his postcode on his application form showed that he resides somewhere in the EC1 area . This means effectively that Mr A will not be spending a lot of time travelling to and from work. The benefits? Your best guess is as good as mine.
A friend who works in one of the banks in Accra tells me that she leaves home at 4am to start work at 8am and does not leave the office till about 7/8pm when traffic is expected to have calmed down in the capital. This, in my estimation, is a very unproductive use of employee time which the banks could help address by moving staff to branches close to their places of residence. Of course this is not as simple as that as some employees may generally prefer to work at particular locations no matter how long it takes them to commute. That notwithstanding, the options ought to be made available and prospective employees incentivised to take up these options. Of course to get this done will require policy levers at the national and local levels (a subject which may be discussed in future write-ups).
If allocating employees to branches based on their residential locations is not feasible, what about car-sharing? I know a number of people who live in the same neighbourhood and work almost at the same locations in Accra. I also know that each one of them has at least one car. In the face of the limited resources to expand the existing stock of transport infrastructure, government will do well to play a leading role in incentivising people to car-share or car-pool as a way of helping reduce the number of cars on our streets. Again, how this is done and the potential barriers to the implementation of such a scheme is a subject that can be explored later. But for now, this is an option that is available for consideration for our policymakers.
For clients who take money to the banks and for those who go to withdraw money, again the banks have an important role to play. In this day when tremendous efforts are made towards ‘cashlessness’, I shudder when I see the huge sums of money people carry with them in modern day Ghana. I was once in a bank and saw a man withdraw what I understand to be over 10 million Ghanaian cedis in a Ghana-must-go bag. Now, that is nearly Two Million Pounds!!! (sorry, like most diasporeans, I need to do the conversion in order to appreciate the amount of money involved). I have never had the ‘pleasure’ of withdrawing such a huge amount of money but I know how distasteful it was when I tried to withdraw about £8,000 in London. The questions I was subjected to were enough to deter me from doing same in future. In comparison to the money I saw the man withdraw, £8k is infinitesimal. And so for the Londoner that I am, seeing one man carry £2m with him was (to say the least, amazing). Amazing as that was, my interest as a transport planner was more on the question of whether such a transaction could have been carried out in a way that would have eliminated the need for the ‘big boy’ to travel to the branch. Of course the risks of carrying such a HUGE amount of money in a car cannot be overemphasised.
Interestingly, a survey conducted by Google and iHub Research in 2012 revealed an increasing use of mobile internet in Ghana with the most visited sites being Facebook (31%), Google (14%) and Yahoo (13%) among others. Interestingly, the data did not say anything about internet/electronic banking in Ghana. And yet, there is evidence to show that most of the banks in Ghana have electronic banking services with standards that compare favourably with their counterparts in developed contexts. My personal experience with one of the banks in Ghana shows a high standard of ICT use in the bank - a phenomenon I understand, is replicated in almost all the banks in Ghana. I found, to my pleasure, that I am able to metaphorically do anything (of course, except changing a man into a woman, to paraphrase Jean-Louis de Lolme) in the very comforts of my living room. All I need is my laptop or smart phone and a good internet connection. I can for instance transfer money (between banks, within banks or even across contexts), request for payments to be effected on my behalf etc etc , all in the very comfort of anywhere I find myself (even under a baobab tree in the remotest part of Pusiga) as long as I have a secure internet connection. Now, why this revolution in electronic banking is not taken advantage of, is something that baffles me. I hate queues and the sight of them stresses me up, and so why someone who spends the whole day on Facebook or WhatsApp will travel to a branch to carry out a transaction he could have done in his home baffles me. Whatever the reasons may be, the government has an important role to play in pushing the agenda of electronic banking in order to help ease off some of the unnecessary pressure on our roads.
All the above narrative, however, has to do with the starting process of obtaining a PASSPORT APPLICATION FORM.
Sheriff Idriss-Yahya
Institute for Transport Studies
University of Leeds, UK