I’m Alive Says Man to PDM Officer
To my surprise I was told by the staff member for the voter registration that I was listed as ‘Deceased’.
Tevita Poese goes about his day like most individuals. He works for the Ministry of Fisheries, has five children, and loves his beer and kava.
But to the Births, Deaths and Marriage (BDM) Office, the administration that supposedly holds our valid identity documents, he is dead.
Or to put it into a politically correct term, Mr Poese is deceased!
That’s right. A human error as the Registrar General for BDM, Neel Singh, admitted yesterday. “Sometimes there is a similar name, similar place of birth and similar parent’s name and during data entry they put the watermark on the wrong birth certificate,” Mr Singh said. “We can say that it could be an error from our end. It is a matter of verifying things.
“It could have been a clerical error or maybe the information that they gave was similar to the person who was alive.”
How Poese found out
This week, Mr Poese decided to visit the BDM office to request for his birth certificate as he was interested to buy land.
At the office, he did the needful. Walked to the enquiries desk, jotted down his full name, date of birth and other details.
Then he sat next to others waiting for their names to be called.
A while later, an officer called out his name and handed out the document adding: “This person is deceased!”
To his bewilderment, Mr Poese exclaimed: “How can he be dead when the person in this document is me!” This is not the first time Mr Poese has been documented as deceased by an institution of authority.
Last year, it happened when he renewed his Voter Registration Card. “To my surprise I was told by the staff member for the voter registration that I was listed as ‘Deceased’,” he said.
“Luckily, a staff member there knew me and the registration of my voter card was accepted.” Mr Poese said he had a namesake who had died, and maybe he (Poese) was mistaken for him.
“I told them it was not an excuse to make me dead when I was very much alive. It made me wonder if there are other people out there who are still alive, but at the BDM registrar they are dead,” he said. “A namesake died in 2017 and the BDM registrar record says that he is alive while I am dead.”
Meanwhile, the office has since apologised to the Mr Poese. Mr Singh said he has not received the application but they will do the needful. “When someone’s death is registered, the birth certificate is watermarked as deceased, but it is not that we cannot rectify it,” he said.
“We can rectify, undo it and correct it.”