Ian McDonald
CERTAIN WORDS are beloved of bureaucrats: words like monitor, check, regulate, classify and control. Observe something significant about these words. They all involve delay. Delay is the name of a bureaucrat's game. Faced with an idea, an initiative, a suggested course of action, a possible solution to a problem, the bureaucrat's normal response is "Whoa! Hang on a minute! Where do you think you're going? Hold your horses! Not so fast! That needs to be checked." It is not the job of the bureaucrat to make things happen. Making things not happen for at least a while longer is much more what he considers to be his true line of duty.
I would not wish to be misunderstood. There has to be a bureaucracy to administer any company, organisation or state. And delay is by no means always a bad thing. If there were no mechanisms for review, control, and monitoring all sorts of half-baked, utopian, reckless and dishonest schemes would see the light of day. Delay appropriately applied is essential in order to reject the obviously useless and to correct and perfect the potentially useful.
Sadly, however, what happens too much of the time is that delay becomes an end itself. This is because delay tends to involve less risk, less thought, less worry, and less work. When something is safely under review, it cannot cause anyone trouble, least of all the cosy bureaucrat who can always claim that action is pending. And if action delayed can be converted into action absolutely halted, then better still since the cosiest situation of all for the cosy bureaucrat is when nothing whatsoever is happening.
A WHOLE WAY OF LIFE
Delay can so easily be made into a whole way of life. When this happens, projects are tossed up and down and round about between the various layers of bureaucracy. One set of bureaucrats reviews the project and passes it on for analysis to another set of bureaucrats which passes it on for monitoring to yet another set and so on and on until the ultimate set of bureaucrats either classifies the unfortunate project as not feasible or else surrounds it with so many regulations and controls that all you get in the end is an enfeebled and out-of-date version of the original.
Measure how long it takes to get any proposed action through its various stages of concept, preliminary outline, drafts from first to final, feasibility survey, review sub-committee, tendering process, monitoring procedure, appraisal board, and final approval and the time span involved will give a good indication of how powerful a bureaucracy is at work.
When bureaucracy of the cosiest kind takes root it is desperately hard to dislodge. It feeds on itself. It is self-perpetuating. It protects its own. It becomes expert in justifying itself. It trespasses everywhere. The regulations that control action become more important than the action itself. It becomes much more vital to perfect the mechanism that monitors proposed achievement than actually to achieve anything.
It is a dead-end down which we are led by too many self-satisfied, do-nothing bureaucrats of the international as well as the national kind. You only have to observe the terrible inertia that overtook, and continues to infect, the European Union bureaucracy in disbursing assistance for the Caribbean banana industry to appreciate the full horror of the do-nothing-if-at-all-possible syndrome that can afflict the international set of public servants who are supposed to look after the interests of developing countries.
Ian McDonald is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
