Saturday, March 31, 2007 Roperos: Pursuit of name recall By Godofredo M. Roperos Politics Also
MY younger sister Lorna, married to a Swedish transport system engineer who often works as consultant on projects funded by the World Bank, has since become a Swedish national herself.
Now both in their sixties, they have decided to retire in Cebu.
And so they are not only looking for a place to build their retirement home on but are also applying for dual citizenship. No problem there about her husband, Arne Hansson, but there were problem regarding her re-acquisition of Filipino citizenship.
Among the requirements was an authenticated birth certificate. Since my sister was born in 1944, toward the tail-end of Word War II, she was not registered with the National Statistics Office (NSO). The NSO gave a negative report, so my sister is a non-citizen.
But the civil registrar of my hometown, Balamban, has her record of birth, except that it was not endorsed to the NSO after the war. Her record was endorsed to the NSO for late registration on Feb. 19 per Balamban civil registrar’s letter.
It will take about 10 days to one week for the BC to be encoded and for the local NSO to be able to issue the authenticated certificate. Why it has to pass through the NSO when the data needed for authentication come from Balamban is beyond me.
I found in my file a copy of my sister’s BC certified to by the mayor in 1967. Could this be a kind of extra taxation, requiring citizen-clients authenticated BC at P125 per?
To my dismay, the local passport office would not accept my sister’s application for a new passport without NSO authentication. That is all right since it is policy and part of the process, but the passport office also asks for an authenticated copy of their marriage contract.
My sister was married in Sweden, in the early ‘70s, and nobody told them to report her marriage to the Philippine Embassy. But she had a translation of the Swedish certification of her marriage, and of her becoming a Swedish citizen.
What is painful is what personnel of the NSO did. My sister’s BC was endorsed on Feb. 19 and what is supposed to be only two weeks to process has lasted up to this writing. Why? Because the man at the local NSO office took until the second week of March to send the papers to Manila.
Public service is not something a civil servant takes as an object to possess with the expectation of material returns. It is a commitment to country and people.
But civil servants cited above appear to abound in the civic service. Their varied behavior defines performance, and the public image of their office.
