OPINION: eCitizen Was Meant to End Government Queues. Has It?

By Fatuma Almasi

There was a time when accessing a government service meant knowing where to go, what to carry, how early to arrive and, most importantly, how much patience you had that day.

Now, increasingly, the answer is simpler: “Just go on eCitizen.”

Need a passport? eCitizen. Need a driving licence service? eCitizen. Need a service from the National Registration Bureau? eCitizen.

Use Of eCitizen

Need to access services from the Public Service Commission? Apparently, eCitizen too.

At some point, it starts to feel like the Kenyan government has taken every queue we have ever stood in and put it inside one website.

And honestly, there is something satisfying about that.

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You can sit at home, open your phone, fill in a form and make a payment without spending half a day travelling to a government office.

The government says nearly 21,000 services are now available through the eCitizen platform as part of its wider digital transformation agenda.

There is also an eCitizen mobile application through which users can access government services, while the Digital ID system allows people to digitally verify their identity.

It sounds like the kind of future we were promised.

No endless queues. No folders disappearing between offices. No being sent from one counter to another.

No arriving at 7 a.m. only to discover that the person handling your application is “not in today.”

Just your phone.

Except there is something peculiar about putting a government office in your pocket.

When a physical office frustrates you, at least you know where to direct your frustration.

There is a counter. There is a person. There is a queue. There is someone you can ask, “Sasa nifanye nini?”

An online system creates a different kind of frustration.

A page refuses to load. A payment does not reflect. A document will not upload.

You are told to try again later. Suddenly, you are sitting alone with your phone, refreshing a government website as if persistence itself might convince the system to cooperate.

This is where the conversation about digital government becomes more complicated than simply asking whether an app is convenient.

Digitising a service is not necessarily the same as improving it.

An inefficient process can be moved online without becoming efficient. A confusing form can become a digital form. A long procedure can become a long procedure with a login screen.

The queue can disappear from the pavement and reappear as a loading bar.

That does not mean digitisation is a bad idea. Far from it. Kenya’s digital transformation agenda is intended to expand access to digital services and improve efficiency, while the government continues to develop standards around the integration and interoperability of those systems.

But perhaps this is where we need to ask a slightly different question.

Not: **“How many government services have we put online?”**

But: **“How many government services have we actually made easier?”**

There is a difference.

The first can be measured in platforms, applications, and the number of services available online.

The second is experienced by the person trying to obtain a birth certificate, renew a licence, apply for a service, or simply understand what they are supposed to do next.

A successful digital government system should not merely move government closer to citizens geographically.

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It should make government easier to understand, easier to navigate, and easier to hold accountable.

Because if the citizen still has to struggle to understand the process, wait for a payment to reflect, repeatedly upload the same document, or figure out where to seek help when something goes wrong, then the technology has only changed the location of the problem.

We may have taken the queue off the pavement.

We have just given it Wi-Fi.

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Fatuma Almasi
PHOTO/File