7 - 13 March 2002
Issue No.576
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 March 2002 Issue No.576 |
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Bureaucratic masks
Train passengers hastily judged to have incinerated themselves; an inability to take decisions because decisions imply responsibility; the commercialisation of political life: Nabil Abdel-Fattah* draws some necessary connections
What is the connection between the deaths suffered by third class passengers in the carriages of an Upper Egyptian train and the hasty manner in which statements were issued by the prime minister and minister of transport attributing the responsibility for this catastrophe to the use of spirit stoves by the very passengers who had lost their lives?
Does the fact that these officials' statements were prepared before information became available from the experts who examined the scene of the accident suggest a mode of political thinking and behaviour that contributes to producing accidents of such calamitous proportions? Does such unseemly haste have any bearing on the competence of the political and technical administration of government bureaucracies?
Let us submit, for the sake of argument, that the poor have a mode of behaviour termed "rural," that is counter to the rules of railway transport, and that this behaviour manifests itself in boarding trains without advance reservations, lighting spirit stoves to cook food and hot drinks during the long and tedious journey and riding on the roof or in the baggage storage compartments. Is there a relationship between this behaviour and the daily reproduction of disasters, the deterioration of the quality of life and the collapse in government activity and the rule of law in day-to-day life?
Is there a connection between the population explosion -- a new child born every 23 seconds and a population of 67.8 million as of 1 January 2002 and our suicidal way of driving resulting in levels of traffic injuries and deaths that in other circumstances might suggest a full-scale war? Do the rulings of the criminal and state security courts in the cases of the loan deputies and other senior government officials have any bearing on the gross structural deficiencies and disintegration that can be observed in the state bureaucracy, or on the vacuums that are opening up in the public realm?
The rapid ruralisation of urban space, of networks of societal and institutional relations, of values, behaviour, law and culture have favoured the growth of an anarchic blend of village and shanty town culture, while expanding social marginalisation and other forms of social and political exclusion have given rise to new forms of criminal and symbolic violence. Do these manifestations of a changing society have any bearing on the deaths of hundreds in a dilapidated third-class train? Do they help in determining the reasons behind the gross neglect of the railway sector, a sector that, once upon a time, was perceived as an engine of modernisation but which now seems to epitomise the decline in the process of modernisation?
Such questions must be asked if we are to arrive at even a minimum understanding of the collection of "unfortunate" -- in the parlance of the press and officialese -- recent rail and traffic accidents, or the equally unfortunate series of collapsed apartment blocks and incidents of bribery and other forms of corruption that govern the delivery of -- or lack of -- government services.
The fact is that a deep and complex connection exists between traffic accidents and the non- enforcement of traffic laws, between the deteriorating performance of parliament, the feebleness of parliamentary checks, the exhibitionism displayed by the 200 People's Assembly members who immediately tabled questions following the train accident in an attempt to pay lip-service to their constituents' concerns and the conduct of passengers, the hooliganism entailed in obtaining seats, the lack of technical supervision or maintenance of train services, and widespread corruption. A connection also exists between these phenomena and the speed with which the prime minister issued statements that later proved inappropriate and inaccurate. We should be familiar with such haste, for it typifies the taking of economic policy decisions that are as hastily retracted, further eroding confidence in the market. And the connections are themselves indicative of the deterioration of the culture of government and public administration across all ranks, as well as of the decline in the quality of Egyptian human resources. They underline the prevalence of the play-it-as-it- comes approach that fosters irresponsibility, an "it's not my problem" attitude that generates a general lawlessness. This culture, which pervades all sectors of public administration and all classes, from rich to poor, is made manifest in the increasingly shoddy delivery of government services and the emergence of a culture of collective collusion.
Among the most salient characteristics of this culture is its mode of crisis management. As disasters occur with increasing frequency, as the effects spread through society with increasing speed, the reaction of government has been to cover up the true causes and to shield those responsible for the catastrophes. That such behaviour has become the rule rather than the exception is the product of many interrelated factors, among which we must include the decline in standards of education and in specialised professional training over the decades and the attrition this has wrought on political and technocratic skills and on the levels of expertise exhibited by members of the government, the ruling and the opposition parties. Job promotion, too, is based on acquiescence to one's superiors rather than considerations of competence.
The aging store of technocratic know-how renders today's public administrators unable to cope with the changes that have taken place in their fields of specialisations. There exists, too, a general tendency to shirk responsibility, or to promote accountability, which means that dealing with problems is endlessly deferred until they snowball or erupt in disaster.
It is a situation compounded by rivalries and infighting in government, along with a lack of homogeneity within the cabinet, that has for long inhibited the pursuit of a single policy in any one field.
The absence of appropriate technical expertise combines with endemic corruption and gross negligence in the municipalities, resulting in endless infractions of building codes and safety standards regardless of the human costs of such infractions.
Municipalities and local administrations have themselves evolved into centres of mutual back- scratching. They reproduce traditional systems of allegiances, distributing government services in accordance with the laws of kinship or regional affiliations. So endemic has bribery and nepotism in rural government institutions become that senior officials have suggested that to eradicate such corruption would require the most radical of upheavals.
And all this has occurred at a time when political party activity consists almost entirely of the reproduction of an outmoded political discourse, incapable of describing complex local, regional and global realities, a situation that has led to an entrenched phobia of politics, and the unwillingness, of the part of many of the most talented, to become embroiled in an essentially redundant exercise.
The ethical framework within which political activity and government business is conducted has been subjected to a systematic erosion. The absence of effective checks has seen the ethos of public service devalued: the most notorious examples of the slide in ethical standards are those cases that have hit the press recently of ministers placing their consultative or contracting firms in the hands of family members and then ensuring the same firms win government- sponsored contracts. This, though, is only the tip of the iceberg of nepotism, profiteering and conflicts of interests that pervade government and create a bulwark of entrenched interests resistant to initiatives that reward effort and performance and foster transparency and accountability.
If this were not bad enough, innovation is further inhibited by the generational petrifaction that is the result of a mode of job selection favouring age and seniority and, hence, the status quo over change. The selection of cabinet members from a narrow generational band, in turn, has contributed to the development of a certain mindset among senior officials, whereby government position is the key to establishing social status and creating a network of relations to be tapped once the official leaves office and moves into the realm of business and investment.
Hardly surprising, then, that with so few opportunities for new blood there is a dearth of the kind of creative thinking necessary for us to come to grips with the political, social and bureaucratic problems that bedevil the nation. Instead of devising the necessary innovative and radical solutions the Egyptian people are instead offered the customary topical unguents beneath which problems fester.
There are mounting numbers of victims: victims of traffic accidents, of collapsing buildings, of the appalling state of public health care services, of poor standards of control over agricultural and industrial consumer products. That this is so is indicative of the declining "value" placed on the lives of individual citizens. Indeed, it can be argued that the disregard for the life, health and welfare of the Egyptian citizen constitutes the salient trait of public service. It reflects the embeddedness of a culture inimical to personal or collective responsibility. This is the culture of chaos, a culture in which laws are not applied to those who make them, in which there is a vast gap between the rules and ordinances on paper and the unwritten rules of safeguarding vested interests, a culture in which laws, and the legislative process, have become a commodity subject to the control of the highest bidder.
* The writer is assistant to the director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and strategic studies and editor of the "State of Religion in Egypt" annual report issued by the centre
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