It is impressive that it took less than one day for the Ghana embassy to respond to my article concerning the loss of my passport in the mail. If they had reacted that swiftly to my complaints this whole issue would not have been dragged into the public.
I have been complaining to the embassy since January when I realised that my passport was never going to arrive. It was in February when I became frustrated with unanswered emails and telephone calls that I decided to write the two ordinary letters referred to in my article. Those letters were sent on the same day on Thursday February 18. On Monday Feb 22 I had the following response from the Danish post office customer service:
"We have received your complaint over a missing letter. You need to contact the Ghana Embassy, as Itella (Finnish Post) has adviced you, it is the responsibility of the sender to start a missing letter investigation”
When the embassy declares that they had sent a complaint to Danish post office, what is missing is the date. When did they do that?
So take of note that. It means since January until February 22 the embassy had still not launched any complaint with the Danish post office. And up till now I am not sure they have since the copy the head of consular section claimed he had sent to me hasn't yet arrived. What still amazes me is that it took the Danish customer services two days to respond to me by email. Why couldn’t the embassy do the same via email because I had given all my contact details in the two letters that I had written to both organizations?
On March 4 the Danish post office sent me an email that if I send them my particulars and also particulars of the sender they will launch an official investigation. This was after I had asked them whether they could bypass the Ghana embassy and launch the investigation because the embassy wasn't reacting. On March 16 the Danish post office finally announced to me that my passport was lost and that they have asked the Finnish post office to compensate me.
Please take note of the dates again. So it means all the way until March 16 the embassy had still not launched a formal complaint with the Danish Post as required of them even though I had been complaining to them since January. So when they did they launch a formal complaint on my behalf as they claim in their response? Yesterday?
I was supposed to travel to Ghana December 23 but did not receive my passport before the day of the travel. I start complaining to the embassy in January and until in the middle of March nothing has happened. It means all this while any trips I had to make were held hostage. Nobody knows what I do for a living. Travelling could be part of it.
The lady friend of mine that I mentioned at the beginning of my first article is not a fiction or the figment of my own imagination. She complained to me as a friend and there was no agreement that I mention her name in an article that she knew nothing about. That would be a contravention of a cardinal journalistic principle – protecting the source of information. It did happen and it is not difficult for the embassy to go through their records and find out how many Finns have travelled to Ghana in recent times. After all how many Finns apply for visas to Ghana every year?
I am not entirely unsympathetic to Ghanaian staff working in our missions abroad. They may be not well resourced due to the overall economic situation back home. The difficulties of living and working in a foreign culture where one doesn’t understand the language is not lost on me either because it is part of my lived experience also. Given this backdrop the embassy staff are doing well because they are still able to give satisfactory service.
But I could no longer contain the frustrations of banging at the unopened door of the embassy for three months since the issue was over a missing passport that could have fallen into the wrong hands with serious repercussions for my future travelling.
From their response the embassy appears to be using the tracking code and a transmission message as an alibi to convince the public they bore no further responsibility. The issue is that they failed to react on my complaints for three months in order for me to cancel my passport to halt a possibly case of identity theft.
If it takes that long for the embassy to handle a complaint then it doesn’t give much credibility to the claim that they are working on a “core duty of projecting the positive image of Ghana”. Ghana is a great country and it takes far more than that to project her image.
Linus Atarah
Helsinki
latarah@welho.com
