Today some 30,000 Bahrainis will receive the first batch of this year’s ‘Inflation Fund’ under its new name ‘Financial Support’. Notice the usage of the word ‘first’ , the second, third batches etc will come in the coming months.
Now to some readers, it may not sound so problematic…Well it is
Firstly, there are only roughly half a million Bahrainis in Bahrain, and we have a thingie called the Central Informatics Organization (CIO) who are basically Bahrain’s Big Brother, where every significant piece of information about a Bahraini citizen is supposedly saved in a huge huge database. Over recent years, the CIO have been bumbling about with projects like the ‘Smart’ dumb card (how to get it and how that you can’t use it anywhere at ALL), e-goverment portal which is kinda OK but still undynamic and rigid.
But enough of their daft projects
Last year, the CIO and the Ministry of Social Affairs organized the first Inflation Fund campaign, where they opened registration centres around the country, and made all the poor and old people stand in long queues and basically beg for the handout. During that campaign they gained the financial information of tens of thousands of Bahraini families.
The thing with collecting such a incredibly enormous amount of information, one would think in this age where information is King, they would of saved that information and reused it for at least a year or two before asking citizens to update the information through conventional means, by mail and/or online.
Instead, CIO and MoSA for this year’s handout decided to do the whole registration thing all over again as if nothing happened, and being the techie savvy people they want to be, they launched a website for people to sign in and add in their information..and who are the people who should sign in this website?
That’s kind of daft, isn’t it? But that’s not all my friends,
Now I’m still an employee of MoE and I tick all the boxes that makes me eligible for this year’s Financial Support, so I decided to register online and fill in any missing details (bank details most likely) . So I log on using my CPR No. and my name pops up
Straightforward procedure, So far so good
Then I fill in some information, which sector do I work in, if I’m married or not, etc.. (All information which should be already saved into the CIO database) and press Submit.
Then another form pops up and the first question is..
Are you a Bahraini citizen?
Like WTF, does the CIO only know my name? Where the hell is the rest of my information? Are they keeping on servers to say ‘Oooooh we use combu6ars’? Yet, I continued and filled in the rest of that idiotic form and press Submit.
FAIL! I managed to send my info again the next day, and it went through miraculously! It turns out that I now need to wait to see if I am ELIGIBLE or not and they will apparently send me an email to say if I am or not…
Now, why wouldn’t they already know if I was eligible or not, now with the CIO receiving every single piece of information about me from my date of birth to blood type to where I work and how much I make. Wouldn’t one semi complicated query find out who is eligible or not???
Now being in Japan as a legal alien, I also am eligible for a one time Japanese government handout of 12,000 Yen (about BD50). The procedure was so achingly simple and straightforward it almost made me cry.
I received a letter in the mail in the middle of May saying that I am eligible for the handout. With that letter was a form with all my information (name, address, age and visa status) and asked me if it was correct. Everything was fine and up-to-date, so I flipped to the second page which was about how I could receive the handout, I could do so by cash, mail cheque or transfer straight to my bank account. I wrote down my bank details and copied my Alien Registration Card and bank passbookas proof of my identity and of my bank account’s existence, put all these documents into the accompanied postage paid envelope and posted it in the beginning of June.
I received the 12,000 Yen yesterday in my bank account without any hassle whatsoever.
This is in a city with a population of 2.2 million people, four times more people than Bahrain, and yet they are sure of every single piece of information they have and work accordingly.
Why can’t we be like that, collect accurate information and work according to it to make our lives easier?
I sometimes wonder if it’s a matter of mistrust between our government and us Bahrainis, do they think that we will all ‘fake’ our information in order to get a measly BD600 for a whole year, and that they have to check and re-check the information to see if we’re lying and if we’re not lying they’ll mess up the information [Ar] anyways..
Tags: Bahrain, CIO, dumbasfuck, Financial Support, Japanese Experience, Ministries, Nagoya, Yen
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