Covid-era Kenya through the eyes of an East African ‘alien’

For some of us “aliens”, it was time to come down from Mars and put our affairs on Earth in Kenya in order. If you hold a work and/or resident permit, when the period you are allowed to operate expires, you are “out of status”. It is an elegant way of saying you are an illegal alien.

You can do a couple of things to get back on the right side of the law: Travel and get a three months’ visa or right to operate if you are an East African, or apply for a special pass extending your stay by a few months as you work on getting the real thing that permits you to hang around and do your stuff for longer.

Over the years, I have found that the trip to the Immigration office at Nyayo House, and how the process of renewing one’s residency and work permit works, tells you a lot about where Kenya is at, the state of its bureaucracy, and is also a proxy indicator of state effectiveness, albeit a crude one.

In the past four to five years, a lot of the paperwork and payments have gone online, so there is no fidgeting at the counters paying (for East African nationals from countries that reciprocate, like Uganda and Rwanda, it is free) and fewer people walking about with boxes of papers to prove why they should get permits.

Alien certificate

On the whole, the process has gotten better and much quicker, though, clearly, the procedures in place to deal with the threat of Covid-19 has made wait times long again. The migration of the applications and payments to digital platforms seems to have had the effect of improving temperaments all around. There were no agitated applicants or infuriated immigration officers driven mad by leafing through pages of strange documents.

In all those years, one part of the foreigners’ section of the Immigration office at Nyayo stayed the same — the corner office where you completed the application for an alien certificate, actually an ID. It remained firmly in the Stone Age. The fingerprints were taken the old-fashioned way. You pressed them over a blank ink layer on a metal slab and then pressed them on a page corresponding with the appropriate hand, fingers and thumbs. 

For some reason, it was a difficult exercise, and I could never do it on my own. An officer would always come, hold my fingers and press them down as I bent sideways at the angle needed to complete their rotation. That done, you took to the bucket nearby, which had cottonwool, or whatever fabric of the day, soaked in paraffin or spirit, and then battled for minutes to remove the black ink from your fingers. And if you were nice to the officers, you got a scented wet wipe for the finishing.

The Stone Age fingerprinting has been one of the victims of the pandemic, given that it wouldn’t pass the social distancing test. The makeover is extreme. The room has been brightened with a touch of very white paint. Now the fingerprints are taken electronically. There are bright lights on both sides of the officers’ computers, like those we use for the Zoom meetings that have worn us all down. They hit your face as you blink in the camera for a mug shot. You sign on an electronic pad and off you go.

Stone Age corner

It’s all neat and clinical yet I was conflicted. I had friends in that Stone Age corner. As we worked through the ink, we would chat. They would ask anything — from Ugandan matooke (bananas) to President Yoweri Museveni’s cows. We would crack jokes and they would tell me they didn’t want to see me again, that I was a Kenyan who had wandered off into Uganda and I should get serious and reclaim my citizenship and place. They would tell me things like the drinking problem in rural Murang’a, tribalism in Kenya and how Mwai Kibaki, in hindsight, was a great leader.

My friends are gone. I was confronted by a youthful and professional face. No chit chats. Besides, there was a queue. It had come to the 21st Century but probably lost its soul. I also reflected on the meaning of the fact that it was my last trip there.

An experience a few days earlier, further away at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, suggested that there was an Achilles heel in this new immigration infrastructure. Off a night flight, we arrived at the immigration desk to find the computer system was down. We waited, and waited. An announcement was made that work was being done to restore it. 

Weary travellers put their rucksacks down and sat on them. More flights arrived and the lines grew longer. Mothers sat on the floor and placed children to sleep on their laps. Eventually, after more than an hour, things went analog. Forms were scrounged up; we filled them and got through the old-fashioned way.

I guess it’s true that you can’t have everything in life.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. @cobbo3