By Richard Dablah
There is something almost ritualistic about how public sector reform is announced in Ghana. A press release is issued. A date is mentioned. A directive follows. Then comes the unspoken instruction: bring your body.
So when the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) says vehicle owners whose cars were registered before 2023 must return to its offices for “digital updates,” the message lands with familiar weight. Reform has arrived. Kindly queue.
This is presented as progress. It is not.
A digitisation programme that begins by summoning millions of citizens into physical lines has already betrayed its premise.
Data migration does not require human congestion. It requires system intelligence.
What is being proposed is not digital transformation; it is manual governance wearing a digital badge.
Queues are not neutral. They extract time from people who can least afford it. They create markets for fixers. They reward those who know someone inside.
They turn public service into an endurance test. Any policy that manufactures queues at scale is not merely inefficient; it is socially regressive.
The troubling part is that this was avoidable.
Vehicle registration is one of the most data-rich activities in the state. Plates exist.
Chassis numbers exist. Insurance records exist. Roadworthiness data exists. Customs records exist. Police records exist.
these datasets cannot speak to each other, the problem is not the citizen. It is architecture.
Yet the chosen solution places the burden on the owner of a 2008 Corolla to prove again that the car exists, that it was once registered, that the state itself issued the plate it now claims to digitise.
The state forgets, and the citizen must remember on its behalf.
Digitisation, properly understood, reduces physical contact.
It narrows human discretion. It automates trust where verification is routine.
When it does the opposite, one must ask what is really being digitised: the data, or the inconvenience?
There is also a conceptual confusion at play. Record migration is being treated as a compliance exercise rather than a backend operation.
In mature systems, legacy data is cleaned, validated, and migrated quietly.
Citizens are notified when action is required, not conscripted pre-emptively.
Physical appearance is reserved for anomalies, disputes, or upgrades that genuinely demand presence.
Here, presence is the default. That choice reveals a deeper habit: reform that imitates the old process instead of redesigning it. Paper forms become screens. Stamps become barcodes. The queue remains intact.
One could argue that this is merely a transitional inconvenience. That argument collapses once one considers scale.
Ghana has millions of registered vehicles. Even if a fraction complies within the same window, DVLA offices become choke points.
Productivity is lost far beyond the transport sector. Informality finds oxygen. Corruption becomes ambient.
There is also the matter of trust. Citizens are told this exercise prepares the ground for future systems — smart plates, tracking, and enforcement.
Yet the same future is invoked to justify a present that looks indistinguishable from the past.
When reform rhetoric outruns implementation logic, scepticism is earned.
A smarter approach would have inverted the process. Digital first. Physical last.
Online pre-validation tied to existing records. Automatic clearance for clean matches.
Time-bound windows by plate series. Decentralised verification through licensed garages and insurers.
DVLA as overseer, not gatekeeper. None of this is exotic. None of it requires legislative acrobatics. It requires will and design discipline.
Instead, the reform arrives as instruction, not service.
What this moment exposes is not a technical failure but an administrative mindset.
Digitisation is being understood as an event rather than a system. As a directive rather than a redesign.
As something citizens must adapt to, not something built around how citizens already live.
The danger is cumulative. Each reform that adds friction trains the public to resist the next one.
Each queue teaches the lesson that compliance is costly and avoidance is rational.
Over time, the state becomes something to work around rather than work with.
No one disputes the need to clean records. No one disputes the value of accurate vehicle data.
The dispute lies in the method. Efficiency is not about speed alone; it is about dignity.
A system that demands presence when presence is unnecessary is not asserting order. It is advertising its limits.
Reform does not announce itself by how many people it summons. It reveals itself by how many people it leaves undisturbed.
By Richard Dablah
