The current chaos at the typing centres is wrong, but this is not the fault of the Emirates Identity Authority, Eida, nor even of the typing centres.
The huge rush by an apparent five million people trying to apply for the ID cards before the original December 31 deadline naturally overwhelmed the system, but people need to exercise patience and try to get through the process.
The five million people currently caught up in the chaos had every chance to avoid the mess they find themselves in. Eida had offered every resident in the UAE some years to get through this process, and the rush was very like the rush two years ago, when an earlier Eida deadline struck and similar millions of residents had failed to pay any attention to the on-coming deadline.
But despite Eida's innocence of the present chaos, if it had linked the renewal of a visa to the production of a new ID card earlier, a lot of the chaos could have been avoided.
Many hundreds of thousands of people have to renew their visas every month, and it is a simple improvement to have the ID card issued at the same time. This move could have put millions through the system in the past year, and helped to avoid the present rush.
