Very Red Tape

JANUARY 2003 - While 2003 will introduce a new airport at Lahore to those who may still like to travel in and out of Pakistan, it will remain to be seen whether the airport will be functioning in the way that good international airports do. You can have all the buildings you want and put in all the gadgetry that is necessary, but at the end of the day, your success is measured by the amount of convenience you can offer to the average traveler.

Coming into Lahore or leaving it, is a hassle to put it mildly. I suppose the operating principle in a labour-cheap country like Pakistan is to employ as many people as you can to do as little as possible. Getting out, particularly if you are traveling overseas is a pain in the neck and other parts of the body. It is bad enough to try and put into effect the principle of queuing up since such principles have been long abandoned and by and large you push your way through to the check-in, but once that is secured, there are any amount of people, desks and procedures to muddle through before you can reach the departure lounge. There are the immigration desks, which thanks to our very temporary allies, the Americans, are now armed with computers and cameras. However while new technology is supposed to make things simpler and speed up slow procedures, these hi tech measures have achieved the opposite.

While those who agreed to have these fancy gadgets installed forgot to take into account one rather significant detail, is a matter of conjecture. Enough that the fancy Dell computers that are linked God knows to what parts of the world and which shadowy organizations are now in the hands of yesterday’s heavy-footed immigration clerks. Trained to get through their chores with nothing more hi tech than yellow ballpoints, they are now plodding their way through keyboards and commands that are alien to them. No one thought of either training them in the art of computer handling or replacing them with trained computer operators, these gentlemen and ladies hold up hundreds of passengers for hours as they learn the wizardry of the new technology. Those anxious to catch their flight have to cool their heels as the immigration laboriously ploughs slowly – alphabet at a time as your names are entered. Propping your passport in one hand and searching for the right keys with the other – all enacted at speeds that would make tortoises look like hares, they fumble through the ritual. It is not an easy sight to absorb patiently as one key is located and punched tentatively followed by another. Every now and then, the wrong key gets pushed and the procedure restarts. To add to the stew, you are photographed as well – no, we are not being finger printed so far and that involves more skullduggery with more hi tech gadgetry. Entering the main details of a passport becomes something like attempting to read the dictionary backwards. Putting ill-equipped staff on new equipment is part of the thinking that conditions bureaucracy and since the traveling public has to bear the brunt, it is no skin off anyone’s back to change the situation. Recently, returning passengers from the UK, having patiently queued up in four lines, other than all those who are ‘fetched’ by numerous men in plain clothes and whisked through without any formalities, then had to shift from one foot to the other as the lines moved at excruciatingly slow pace. After an hour of this charade, the people began to shout and scream and hurl invectives in the air since no one was bothered to come and talk to them or pacify them. More intelligent passengers, especially those who had wormed their way to the desk, realized that the best way was to dictate the passport details to the immigration official. This way they wouldn’t have to juggle the passport and read and type it in at the same time. This speeded up things so that the lines were able to now move at six inches every fifteen minutes.

If you survive the slow motion procedural formalities as you prepare to get out of Pakistan, your bureaucratic hassles are not over, not by a long shot. Having had your passport scanned, read, entered and examined from every angle, you escape forward only to run into another official and another desk who too starts examining the passport seconds after it has already been through the same procedure. Is this necessary because the system understands that the first desk is unreliable and incompetent and therefore a second check is essential or is it that there are empty desks lying about and these might as well be filled up? Who knows the deep mysteries that pervade here. Laboriously, the passport is searched, frisked and examined in detail while eye contact is made between you and your picture on the blessed document. Eventually, you are cleared but now have a second screening to contend with, as your bag, jacket or whatever you are carrying, is shunted through a scanner. While this electronic mumbo jumbo carries on, you are physically examined and searched by more staff, all the while your baggage tags are being stamped, punched and stamped and your passport fares no better. Emerging from this overhaul, you have to face yet another check because if you are traveling to the west, you need to show your passport and a set of photocopies to another official, who checks to see if indeed it is the same person. This is not to take offence since you have already traveled through the airport, distributing copies of your passport to sundry officials behind sundry desks. Of course there is no way you can get out of the airport finally without showing all your punched and stamped baggage tags to more examining officials and your boarding card which too has been stamped God knows how many times.

The reason all this nonsense is enacted is of course for your safety but if forty five different organizations have to do their respective bits to ensure this elusive safety than the entire exercise is reduced to a farce of epic proportions. In Pakistan of course there are more security agencies than there are people which may explain why they never have a clue when the security is breached – and that as any red blooded Paki will tell you, happens just about daily. At the airports, there are any amount of agencies operating, each with its own secret mandate and there is obviously no coordination or understanding amongst them. Since they can’t put their act together, passengers simply have no choice but to succumb as politely as they can while the charade is carried out. Nowhere it seems are so many stampings necessary as in Pakistan and all the drill is aimed at checking not your credentials but the work of the preceding official. Once your baggage is screened, it is screened. Once your passport is checked, it is checked. However, this is logical thinking and that, we all know from experience, is something that you don’t find when dealing with petty bureaucrats and the officious self-important organizations who cover up their inherent inefficiencies with streams of paperwork, forms, procedures, stamps, punch machines and other paraphernalia to keep in good form their great authority.

It is going to be nice to enter and exit from Lahore through a new airport with all its conveniences, but it is perhaps asking for too much if the authorities will ever change their way of operating and finally give the citizens a break.