This is a gun-free zone

Some offices have motivational posters on the walls.  Some customer service centres have inspirational sayings aimed at building customer confidence.  Our “local” (45 minutes’ drive away) telecoms office has a sign telling customers that this is a gun-free zone.  They don’t have a great reputation for customer service so it was reassuring to know that, even if the staff were as surly and uncooperative as rumour has it, I was unlikely to sustain any bullet wounds.  As it turned out, the wait wasn’t tooooooooooo long although the deep sighs and occasional tuts from the lady next to me showed that clearly she felt differently.  I didn’t get my problem resolved.  To be honest, I really wasn’t expecting to… but I did have a nice chat with a totally charming guy and he gave me a form.  Is it the right form?  Only time and another trip back to the gun-free zone will tell.

Having the right form is critical.  Not just when it comes to phones, but also visas, birth certificates, driving licences and pretty much every other essential piece of documentation you need.  They all start with a form.  Or many forms.

Last year some time, the girls and I took a trip to the centre of Cape Town to the Home Affairs office there to try to do the late registration of births process that would allow them to take up their dual citizenship.  We joined the appropriate queue only to be redirected to another.  I explained that I wanted to register their births and was given a small forest conveniently repackaged into paper format.  The official insisted that yes, they really did need Neil to fill in a form to determine his right to South African citizenship even though his family are UK born unto the third and fourth (and even more) generation.  We gathered up the reams of paper, and headed off to find Neil to get him to bring us up to speed on his parents’ place of birth.  Some hours and several gallons of ink later we returned to the office, queued again and saw a different person.  She carefully and methodically examined every form, before telling me I needed a letter from the UK government confirming that I was a British citizen at the time of the girls’ births.  Apparently, there was some possibility in her mind that in spite of having British citizenship at birth and a current British passport, a scenario might exist whereby I had lost/relinquished/been stripped of my British citizenship, had two children and then had British citzenship restored.

I tried to point this out to her but she only said “Well, I can send it up to Pretoria like this if you like, but they will only send it back…”   The comedian Trevor Noah once said that he was stunned to discover that Pretoria was actually a place as he had always thought it was a large hole in the ground into which laughing bureaucrats happily tipped paperwork.  Subdued by the threat of Pretoria, I meekly took back my paperwork and headed home.

At this point, any Brit who is feeling quietly smug about foreign bureaucratic ineptitude might want to wander off and make a cup of tea or a gin and tonic because it turns out that the UK Home Office weren’t exactly helpful either.  Actually, I first tried the British Consulate in Cape Town.  You know, the consul… the one who is here to help British nationals in a foreign country?  Once I had worked out the limited opening hours (between 11:30 and 11:32 on every third alternate Thursday when there is no R in the month, I think), I found out that they don’t produce letters for anyone.  Ever.  Next step was to email the Home Office who very helpfully replied to my email with a form. (Because I didn’t have enough of those already)  They very kindly said that if I paid them £130 and returned the form they would tell me if I was eligible to apply for a British passport.  In the spirit of true British politeness I referred them gently to my previous email and the attached copy of my passport… the British one… asking if there was some other way they could confirm my British-ness.  In the spirit of true international civil service bureaucracy, they replied that if I filled in the form and paid them £130 they would assess my eligibility for a British passport.

Mother and baby elephant on the long walk to register the baby’s birth…

I went and made a cup of tea.

And there it sat.  A small and unwelcome pile of paper on my desk, smirking quietly whenever I looked its way, until a chance comment on a local Facebook group put me in touch with a lady living nearby.  She told me to go to a different office (“Ignore what it says on the Home Affairs website about them only processing this at certain offices”), to bypass the queue (how terribly un-British!) and to ask by name at reception for a particular lady.  So I did.  And the result is that three months later, Izzy is now the proud owner of a South African birth certificate and a letter from the South African government saying that she is a South African citizen and is therefore invested with the right to say “Howzit”, “Izzit?” and “Shame!” and to toyitoyi as required.  (I think that was in the small print somewhere.)  Zoe’s will take a little longer as, being over 16, there are police checks to be made.  Now that Izzy has this, she no longer needs to renew her study visa later this year, saving us quite some time in form filling and queuing and also quite a lot of money which would have to be paid out for a chest x-ray and the visa processing fees.

Another time I can tell you about our attempts to apply for permanent residency for Neil, but neither you nor I have got the stamina for that particular saga right now.