Kenyans in Houston, Texas, expressed frustrations over the recent eCitizen downtime and malfunction while trying to utilize consular services online.
In a good will initiative by community organizers and volunteers to bring Consular Services to Kenyans in and around the Houston area, many Kenyans applauded and embraced having these services brought to them locally.
OTP System Glitches
The eCitizen platform uses a multi-factor authentication process that sends the account holder either an email, or an SMS message when logging on, before being granted full access to your account.
Speaking in confidence to The Kenya Times, some Kenyans lamented that they could not access services on the platform for several days and that the process was fraught with OTP and payment issues related to the eCitizen digital platform.
The system glitch was first noticed on April the 3rd, through the 4th, where users were unable to receive notifications to proceed logging onto their account.
According to some, the downtime forced them to contact relatives and friends back in Kenya to help them access the digital platform and process important documents.
Their challenges and inconveniences came despite the presence of Mobile Consular Services in the city run by the State Department for Diaspora in the United States.
“This has caused quite some frustration, especially knowing that the State Department was the one that stood these consular services and pushed them to us as citizens.”
“It is very shameful that a whole exercise of this magnitude that has been advertised by the state department can’t be completed seamlessly,” one of the affected Kenyans indicated.
Also Read: Govt Gives Way Forward on 600,000 Pending IDs
Consular Representatives on Trouble with eCitizen
However, consular officials in the city asked individuals having trouble accessing the platform to reach out promising that they could use their backend to access some of the applications.
The representatives promised to push some of the applications that were already completed for printing. This meant that they had to take time from their engagement to work on this additional responsibility.
Also Read: Govt Asks Urgent Passport Applicants to Pay Ksh1,500 for Upgrade
Some of the documents people were trying to process included Passport Applications/Renewals, Birth certificates and National Identification Cards (IDs).
Diaspora Principal Secretary Roseline Jogu
The Kenya Times reached out to the Diaspora Principal Secretary (PS) Roseline Njogu over the matter, and she indicated that some of the concerns would be addressed during the ongoing consular services engagements.
She, however, did not acknowledge having received any complaints about eCitizen delays despite numerous complaints on the WhatsApp community driven public forum related to the exercise.
The Judiciary also issued a statement indicating that there was a intermittent system outage on its eFiling system, apologizing for the inconvenience.
As of this morning, The Kenya Times verified that the OTP service from eCitizen was back online and functioning, and people were able to log on to the platform.
Discussion about this post