At The Passport Office

A US passport is good for a period of ten years. You have your picture taken at the post office and a postal employee will authenticate all the required documents and you mail it to the nearest processing center. The whole deal takes very little time, people have to work to make a living in this country.

In the Philippines, our passports are good for five years. This is another one of those small gestures with which we show our gratitude to the millions of our “modern heroes”, a rich source of revenue to our foreign affairs office. Applying for a passport is a big deal, be prepared to spend a few months in certain cases especially if the place where they keep a record of your birth certificate had burned down or something; and don’t get too frustrated tipping people everywhere if you want your application to prosper.

It used to be easy to renew a Philippine passport. It has become more complicated, again. We have a genius for adding layers of bureaucracy that essentially add nothing but inconvenience to a system that is groaning to be streamlined in the first place. Anyone applying for a renewal must now present oneself for a “personal appearance” at the main office in Manila in front of a clerk in a window who pastes your photograph in the form and watches you sign your name. This took place in a crowded room crawling with a cadre of “Liaison Officers” appointed expressly to facilitate the procedure. Just like in lieu of a baggage carousel, we continue to have hundreds of porters in less prosperous airports, we create livelihood opportunities for people to participate in a grossly inefficient scheme that drains productivity.

Looking at the sweating throngs of people waiting outside the building, I thought of all the lost productive hours for what was fundamentally a stupid system that was heavily unfavorable to those who didn’t have a connection to a general, a bishop, a judge, a politician. You will never see influential public servants and his extended family and friends in these premises.

And it is the same elsewhere, try getting a drivers license, police clearance, land titles, court orders, marriage license, medical attention in a government hospital--if you are poor and unconnected, and the overwhelming majority of Filipinos belong in this category, you invariably feel violated by a government that preferentially operates in a manner against the public interest.