Dear MoH, fix your Covid tracker app

The cost of a single twist of sloppy coding is playing out every day at Kenyan airports, as the malfunctioning Ministry of Health passenger locator form causes queues and locks up staff.

So bad is the error, and so prolonged — now eight months since the first time it tripped me up — that when I arrived at Wilson Airport last week, they had finally given up even trying to get arriving passengers to provide the form’s QR code.

Instead, there was now an official there with just a sheet of paper, asking everyone to write down their name and phone number.

Three weeks earlier, passing through the same arrival hall, there were still five staff showing people how to find the mysterious QR code.

That’s five staff, all day, eight months, multiplied by, say, 10 airports, some like Lamu with few arrivals, infrequently, some like JKIA with large numbers, constantly.

I reckon the salary bill on that one faulty piece of technology is certain to have topped Sh10m this year, and probably Sh30m, in that JKIA isn’t a five-staff entry point as planes arrive at different terminals with passengers in their hundreds.

But what worries me about this, whether the cost is Sh10m or Sh30m, is what it says about the competency and resource management skills of our MoH. For if it cannot manage a simple paragraph of text to save all that pointless extra work, then how does it organise the effective healthcare delivery?

For, the problem with the form is a strange quirk, but, my own web developer tells me, not at all difficult to rectify.

Step one already has a problem, in that the domestic version of the passenger locator form is built as an online form that must give your permanent address and your temporary address, too, in a county and subcounty of Kenya.

I have literally watched foreigners asking officials over and over how to enter their real permanent address — in the US, Germany or wherever.

There is no way. The form won’t submit, so they can choose a county and subcounty to call their permanent home or get no QR code at all. There is no other path.

Thus, all the internal flight forms are wrong for foreigners from the moment they exist.

But the real joy of an MoH passenger locator form is the decision to hide the QR code it generates.

When the form is submitted it automatically emails the QR code. If you have filled it out on a PC or laptop, the QR code shows in the email.

But open that same email on your phone — oops, it’s blank. No QR code. Now more than 95 percent of Internet use and users in Kenya are on phones. But, on phones, the MoH QR code email always arrives blank, with no visible QR code.

Hats off to the spirited developer who got paid by the MoH for this no-visible-QR-code delivery system.

I wish I could have witnessed their defence of this tiny little problem. I didn’t. But if they said it wasn’t possible to fix: not true. My developer can help you out MoH. I’ll cover the cost.

In the meantime, the dozens of staff meeting every single plane across our land throughout 2021 have had to tell almost every passenger that if they have an Android phone, they must open file manager, and they show people where that is in settings, and then downloads, and there is the QR code in a file in downloads.

The instructions are different for iPhones and many of the staff don’t know how to reach those downloads.

So, me and my web developer have another offer too: we can add a paragraph of text into the autogenerated email saying if you can’t see the QR code in the email where to go on your Android or iPhone to find it.

Now, I think I may deserve an award for this public service, because the MoH could not add that sentence in eight months, but my developer says he and I can do it in about four minutes. So, clearly, he and I are geniuses. Thank you.