Driving licence renewal

It's been two and a half years so must be time to renew my Nigerian driving licence. How I do look forward to all my encounters with the efficient machine that is Nigerian bureaucracy.
Things began fairly promisingly. I was able to start the renewal application online, print out my form then go off to the bank to pay the fee and get the all important bank slip proving I'd done it. Next I called in at the licensing office. For some reason, even for a renewal, applicants' fingerprints and biometric data have to be rerecorded as of course these things could have changed in the intervening years. This is where the bottleneck occurs. There is one unreliable data capture machine, unreliable internet access and extremely unreliable electricity, not to mention a decidedly limited supply of official cards - all making a recipe for disaster.
I was encouraged to find no queue at the office when I arrived on Wednesday afternoon. This looked as if it was going to be surprisingly easy. I showed the officer my documents; he said they only used their machine in the mornings and told me to return on Tuesday at 7:30am. Was this my personal appointment? I asked. No, everyone was given the same time and would be taken in turn. Could he guarantee the machine would be working? Of course.
This morning, after a night of little sleep, avoiding my usual breakfast coffee in anticipation of a long wait, I left the house at 7am, hoping that African time would mean that few people would actually be there at 7:30.
I walked through to the licensing office, passing lots of people sitting outside, apparently waiting for their tax id numbers, and was glad to see only three others before me in the queue for driving licences. Together we waited quietly.
At 7:30 a tsunami of people crashed into the narrow corridor. "We have numbers," they cried as they surged up to the office door. Twenty or so angry people in an enclosed space, together with a line of others already waiting there does not make for a comfortable situation. "We will not let anyone in before us. We have numbers. We will not move."
These were the people from outside. Their given time had been 6:30am. They'd been told to wait and been allocated numbers; no one had said anything to the 7:30ers and it wasn't surprising that after an hour's wait they were angry at the thought of losing their place.
The officials only turned up at 7:30. Why had these people been given a time that no one intended to honour? Why were so many people told to come at once when we were told only the first twenty would get their details captured - there were more than that in the first batch alone and others kept arriving?
I gave up and left. By 8:15 no one had been seen, the machine not even started up. I wasn't the only one. Several Nigerians left too, lamenting the state of affairs. One lady had paid her fee in January and tried several times to complete the process to no avail. So many live hand to mouth, many have jobs and cannot keep taking days off to wait in vain for the driving licence office to get its act together. There is no organisation, little communication, no redress for most people, and it isn't hard to see how the reactions swing from disheartened endurance or giving up to the ready potential for violence.