We should all be inspectors

A visiting friend recently asked me where in Kigali one can spend an evening ‘in a civilized way’. Well, being city savvy I was not short of options. I took her through a list of the different hangout places you can think of in this ‘garden city’ but the look on her face said it all; something was wrong. To cut the story short, a theater is all she wanted. My usually retentive memory betrayed me, or did it. There was not any, on second thought.Need breeds innovation. I turned my small apartment into a mini theater, with Nikolay Gogol’s The Government Inspector acted on screen.In the Government Inspector, Gogol created a master piece in dramatic realism. He makes people laugh at their own folly; corruption. In this slapstick filled satire a government inspector is rumored to be in town, travelling incognito. News of his presence causes panic among the local, highly corrupt, politicians and businessmen.The mayor and his fellow dignitaries mistake a penniless young opportunist for the dreaded incognito inspector. They compete to impress him; making fools of themselves by offering boundless hospitality and bribes in order to turn his attention away from the crying evils of their administration.It is only after the departure of the impostor that the arrival of the real inspector is announced. Given that good literature transcends space and time, it is not farfetched to draw comparisons with the satire of the nineteenth-century Russia. The arrival of the real inspector got me thinking about our very own inspector; the Premier. In a move that has sent shock waves in both public and private institutions, the Premier Damien Habamuremyi has embarked on a campaign that has caught many ‘pants down’. Impromptu visits to public institutions in the city and in the rural areas have revealed a gaping hole in service delivery. During one visit to a district in the Eastern Province, he found the offices deserted with no one to attend to people. At a hospital in the city, the doctor chatted away on his cellular phone as the Premier waited to be attended to. These and many incidents have been widely reported in the media. Much as the initiative is a marvelous innovation, it should serve to ignite ‘the inspector’ in every one of us. One of the major challenges this country faces is poor customer care. It gets worse when even those who are given a poor service accept it. On a recent trip to the southern province, I checked in a popular hotel in Huye town to unwind with a cold drink. The waiter delivered it as requested but the problem was that the table on which he placed it was uncomfortably a few meters away. Standing a few meters away and glued to the Television screen, I asked the young waiter to help me draw the table closer. I was in for a shock of my life: ‘can’t you do it yourself’, was the response. The fighter in me could not stomach this humiliation. A brief chat with the hotel owner not only got me an apology but also an extra free bottle. The Head of State or the Premier can only do as much. It is for our own good that we all turn inspectors.

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We should all be inspectors