The Rot

           Photo credit: Nigerian Tribune

A friend recently shared her experience at the Nigerian High commission in London and made me promise to write about it. 

She was there to get a particular service which could have been simple but then in our Nigerianess the procedure became rocket science glazed with time wasting, suffering and conscienceless attitude of the Commission's staff.

The first thing her teenage daughter noticed was that the windows were very dirty against the other windows of other offices in the same building. Nigerians why?😔 The inside was even worse; smelly and dirty.

My friend and her daughter were at the High Commission before 9am and hoped that getting there early would mean leaving early but how wrong they were.

From 9am till about 2pm only fifteen people who came to renew their  passports were called up to do their biometrics. A woman that she met there told her that she had come from Leeds and had to find a place to sleep because she did not complete the tedious process on the day that she came. 

She also noticed that people had to come to the embassy to pick up their passports because the Nigerian High Commission does not mail people's passports to them. They also had to log in manually into a long notebook the details of their passports and at this point the question is "what happened to computers and database?"

While they sat  without any form of communication regarding their fate for the day, my friend made more observations. There is no arrangement for people with baby strollers or wheelchairs. They just carry their crosses down the stairs all by themselves. 

At 3pm a man whose spoken English was extremely poor came out and  made an announcement. It took an extra explanation to learn that the man had asked those who had come for emergency travel documents to go to a certain window. 

My friend got to the window and when she said she would pay with her card she was told that the POS machine was faulty. She was asked to walk down the road to get money order. 

After spending over seven hours, my friend was non challantly told by a cashier that she had to leave the building to go and get money order. Just like that! Why do we love to hate us and then hate to love us? I'm as confused as this sentence.

No apologies for the delay and no explanations whatsoever. How bad can we be as a people? The restroom was beyond gross but thankfully had toilet paper.

Sapped of energy and the zeal to remain a Nigerian and without a word of protest my friend gently left the commission to go and get the money order. 

When she was finally done, she had spent over eight hours of her day in that very hostile environment.

As she walked out of the madness of the environment, she prayed to God for one thing - to miraculously grant her another citizenship of any other country as compensation for the rot of our nation that we suffer.