Getting out of the Dark Ages

I had to obtain two documents from the government within the past two weeks, and the way each one is handled by the respective agencies responsible is an interesting study in contrast.

Two weeks ago, my brother in Texas asked me to obtain a copy of his birth certificate. So I got on my laptop computer, went to the National Statistics Office’s e-Census website (www.ecensus.com.ph), followed the clear instructions, entered the necessary information, submitted it online, and got an e-mail confirmation of my order. Then I went to my bank’s website, paid the P325 fee for the birth certificate via the online bills payment facility, got an e-mail confirmation of my payment, and I was done. Time spent: less than 15 minutes, all in the comfort of my own home. The document arrived by courier within a few days. The NSO has been offering this e-census service for more than 10 years now.

Those of us with longer memories will remember how the NSO offices along Santa Mesa used to have kilometric lines of people in front of it, waiting to apply for a copy of this all-important NSO-certified copy of their birth record. The NSO used to process thousands of such applications manually every day, and the hapless public had no choice then but to go through the punishing experience of waiting in line outdoors for hours, sometimes days. For the NSO, that is now ancient history, thanks to its e-governance initiative.

Last week, I needed to obtain a National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) clearance. Since I already had an old one obtained in 2007, I sent my driver out early in the morning to have it renewed at any of those mall-based NBI clearance centers. After going to malls from Makati to as far as Marikina, he came back in the afternoon empty-handed because wherever he went, all the NBI counters he knew were no longer there. Someone had told him that I would have to appear in person at the NBI Main Office on Taft Avenue.

I decided to brave the rain and flooded streets to proceed to the NBI Main Office that same afternoon, hoping to get the matter over and done with, and prepared to line up for hours if need be. I finally arrived at 4:00, but was promptly turned away by the gate guards who said that the line had been closed since 1:00 p.m. A streamer on the fence announced that new NBI Clearance Centers had just opened starting that day in Robinsons malls around the city. So I proceeded from Taft straight to Robinsons Galleria Mall in Pasig, to find the exact location of the counter, study the layout and plan my moves for next morning. The mall opens only at 10:00, I was told, so there is no point being there any earlier.

I came at 9:25 next morning, figuring that I could get ahead on the line that way. A crowd had already formed at the mall entry points where guards were then admitting only mall employees with IDs. But by parking in the basement parking area, I found I was able to bypass the mall door guards, and could proceed directly to the NBI counter at the basement. Twelve other people had already found their way there ahead of me, and the officers behind the counter began processing the first 10 applicants at 9:30. I was congratulating myself for my good fortune that morning, expecting to be out of there with my NBI clearance in no time. After all, I was number 13 on the line. It turned out to be an unlucky number.

All hell broke loose when the mall officially opened at 10:00. Hordes of people came stampeding in from two directions, and almost instantly, our line of 13 literally turned into what must have been well over a thousand, overflowing way beyond the area cordoned off for the serpentine queue. Those of us in front began to sense trouble when we saw that it was taking each applicant an average of 15 minutes to be processed, mainly because information we were made to fill into an information sheet had to be manually encoded into the NBI computers. And there were only two ladies doing that, hunt-and-peck typists constantly making mistakes as they typed. It was nearly 11:00 when I finally got my turn, and as luck would have it, that was when my encoder’s computer decided to hang, and no attempt by their technician to fix it worked. I had to wait for the other remaining encoder (I have no idea if the frozen computer got back into service that day). Fine, I told myself—at least I saw those ahead of me walking away happily with their prized NBI clearance after the ordeal.

Well, no such luck was in store for me that day. I always thought no one else could possibly have my name, but it turns out that the NBI computers have two persons supposedly with my exact name being investigated for crimes, one of them for murder! How a murderer and another lawbreaker ended up having or using (more likely) my name, I will never know. But I did not get my NBI clearance that day, and was told to return after a week, to know if I will need to be interviewed at the main office.

But never mind that. What really prompts me to write on this experience are the questions my frustrated companions in line were asking: “Why can’t they save a lot of time and let us encode our information by ourselves at home, like in the new online passport applications?” “Why can’t the NBI, POEA, and other offices get out of the Dark Ages and into the Internet age like the NSO?” “Why is our government seemingly bent on giving us citizens so much difficulty for simple things like this?” And so on.

As for the thousand or so still lined up behind me that day, simple arithmetic told me that at the rate things were moving, the NBI counter would be lucky to serve even a hundred on that day.

E-mail: cielito.habito@gmail.com