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Letters, register copies, payments and bag sales are queue jobs and you can simply come. Numbers are issued from eight in four streams, and the letters stream usually runs at about ten minutes.

Permits, registry corrections and anything with paperwork are appointment jobs. Twelve slots of ten minutes between three and five, booked on this site or by telephone. Coming in for one of those without a slot means being given a slot for another day.

Stream one is letters and register copies. Stream two is payments and bags. Stream three is permits. Stream four is everything else, including fault reports that need the inspector and anything the desk has to look up.

Most of the waiting in this office is people in stream four who wanted a letter. The signs are at the door and any of the staff will point you.

Letters, register copies and payments, nine until noon, for people who cannot reach a counter on a working day. About seventy people use it.

It does not do permits, registry corrections, appointments or fault reports needing the inspector. The ward has twice decided against extending it, because the staff who cover Saturday are the same nine who run the weekday desk.

The desk will tell you whose it is, give you the office, its hours and what to take, and where it can, telephone them while you are standing there.

Water, electricity, road resurfacing, the buses, building permission, the health centre, the schools, identity documents and land ownership are all somebody else's. Half of what this desk does is sending people to the right place the first time, and it keeps a list precisely so that nobody is sent round three buildings.

No, and this is the most important sentence on the subject. There are three hundred and ten marked resident bays in this ward and six hundred and forty permits.

A permit is the right to use a resident bay in this ward when one is free. It is not a reserved space, not a space outside your own house, and not something the ward can enforce against a neighbour who got there first.

Renewals run in the first three weeks of January, by appointment rather than by queue, and slots open in December. One hundred and fifty rufiyaa a year.

A second permit for one household is possible where two people at the address each need a vehicle for work. It is decided at the desk on the papers you bring, and about one in five second applications is refused.