Columnists

Accessing government offices a headache

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National Treasury building in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Stood in a stuttering lift somewhere in the National Treasury building, recently, it struck me there can be an equal opposite to economies of scale, where work instead becomes slower and more inefficient on size, incurring rising costs and receding timelines.

For, at the heart of Kenyan government, and business life, sit an array of malfunctioning lifts that are sucking the time out of public and private offices alike, every single day.

As it is, businesses, and government departments, cannot all be on the ground floor, or often, even, on a single floor. But when an operational department is on the 7th, and the accounts department is on the 5th, a poor batch of lifts - and stairs that rarely seem findable - can truly act as a great divide.

For newcomers, the trick seems to be to quiz other waiting lift-takers early on. People will usually help with your Bruce House tips on no lifts to the 4th floor – ‘you need to go to the 7th and walk down’, or National Treasury pointers, ‘you’re best to catch the VIP lift if you want to get to the 14th’.

But even for the seasoned lift navigators of Nairobi, the time spent moving from any one floor to another has to constitute a cost of doing business that the World Bank does not yet include in its indicators.

For how many of our lifts in our major buildings in Central Business District and across all our government departments, actually, genuinely work?

And how does the ‘time and motion’ study look on building entry, exit, and even cross-functional meetings or conversations?

At Times Tower, in our Kenya Revenue Authority offices that probably should be emptier now we all file and pay our taxes and even get our certificates online, queuing for the central bank of lifts can take several arrivals before there is even one to enter.

So, if you’re on staff, and on the 9th floor, that’s probably 30 minutes a day, 15 at either end, to get to your desk and away, without taking lunch: and an hour a day waiting for lifts if you stop for lunch too.

Add to that the need – and it is certainly there, as lifts fill up across our city with service staff with water bottles, and cling-film wrapped meals, and tea flasks, and rubbish bags – to get staff and equipment on and off our city business floors.

Even in brand new office blocks in Upper Hill, I have ended up walking with my team up five floors and even seven floors of stairs, because the one and only lift is involved in a long and complicated set of journeys carrying toilet rolls skywards.

And in how many of those buildings are the stairs accessible and findable and useable?

But if it is that hard and complicated to get into and out of these 7th, 10th, 13th and 16th floors for routine meetings, form dropping, or simply to do a day’s work, whatever can we hope for in case of fire or any emergency?

Indeed, it’s at that point I wonder who checks on safety and emergency entry and exit in all these buildings with their quirky, overloaded and ailing lifts and hidden or locked or blocked stairs.

For really businesses should look deeper into this – before staff get trapped skywards in an entry and exit mess that no-one ever bothered to sort out.

A look at ‘processes’ and how and when the water bottles come up, and how and when staff move pieces of paper from one floor to another, and how many they can move in the current lifts at what cost in salaries expended waiting for lifts – all told, lifts actually should be a little higher on our thinking agenda.

It isn’t OK to just get used to those 20 minutes waits, and three rides to get to a single floor.

We should stop ignoring the hard journeys up, and stop putting up with it, and remember, as we struggle into a building where getting to the office is as complicated as that, that getting out would be even worse, and especially in an hour of need.