By Watchdog reporter
Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC) Board Chairman Simon Kaheru was recently almost deported from China over immense weight loss.
On arrival to Beijing China for a business trip, as per a normal procedure of checking in, Kaheru approached the immigration counter.
As the immigration officer looked through Kaheru’s passport, he sensed something unusual about Kaheru’s look; his physical look was almost different from that in the passport photo.
The reason was simple, Kaheru had lost some good weight and the immigration officer couldn’t not equate the Kaheru in the passport photo to the Kaheru he was actually seeing face to face.
“Normally they take a look at the photo, glance at me, stamp and then we go. He looked at the photo, glanced at me, looked at the photo again, then looked at me properly,”
“He kind of signalled for me to turn to the left a bit, so I gave him the right hand side profile. He then signalled to the right and I gave him my left. He looked back at the photo and wasn’t satisfied,”
According to Kaheru, it took him a minute to release what the problem was. On figuring out the problem of the whole issue, Kaheru looked into his phone gallery for his before and after photo which he showed to the officer thus saving the day.
“He looked to and fro again, then shook his head. It took me a minute to figure out what the problem was. Many people on the street also do this at times – look, look again, shake head a bit, then either confront or move on”
“Luckily, I have sent a couple of people my Before and After photographs before, and know how to readily pick them out of my gallery.Within seconds I had the phone held up to his face and as he screwed up his eyes I was worried for a second that he couldn’t actually see anything, then remembered that was probably a racist thought,”
‘Giving me the thumbs up, he turned to his pals and said something in the language that his people use (I keep saying it’s not Chinese, but I don’t find them committal on this Mandarin-Cantonese thing)”
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