Certain words are beloved of bureaucrats; words like monitor, check, regulate, review, classify, and control. Observe something significant about these words. They all involve delay. Delay is the name of the 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 are going? Hold your horses! Not so fast!”
Politicians worth their salt use “We will make things happen!” as their battle cry. But beneath their breath every cosy bureaucrat in the system whispers “Not if I can help it, they won’t.” It is not their job to make things happen. Making things not happen is much more what they consider to be in their line of duty.
I would not wish to be misunderstood. There has to be a bureaucracy to administer any company, Ministry or state. And delay is by no means 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 and drag the nation down. Delay, properly applied, is essential in order to reject the obviously useless and to correct and perfect the potentially useful.
Sadly, however, what happens all the time is that delay becomes an end in 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.
Delay can so easily be made into a whole way of life throughout an organisation. When this happens, projects are tossed up and down and round about between the various layers of the bureaucracy. One set of bureaucrats review 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 so 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not feasible or else surrounds it with so many regulations and controls that all you get in the end is an enfeebled and out-of-date version of the original project.
Measure how long it takes to get any proposed action through its various stages of concept, preliminary outline, feasibility survey, review sub-committee, 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 and how backward an organisation, or a nation, is.
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. It infiltrates the highest reaches of administration. It sets itself up as important in its own right and not, as it should be, important only in so far as it gets things done. In fact getting things done is not its idea of success of all. Administration for the sake of administration is what matters. The regulations that control action become more important than action itself. It becomes much more vital to perfect the mechanism that monitors proposed achievement than actually to achieve anything. That is the ultimate dead-end down which a cosy bureaucracy take all of us.
There are international indices measuring the extent of bureaucratic delay. Poor countries tend to be badly placed in these indices which describe the impact of unwieldy governmental procedures on the pace of development and growth. It would be good to know where Guyana stands in this league of performance inhibitors. All I know is that you ask anyone in business, industry, trade, or the professions, each will have his own horror story of bureaucratic delay, interference, or outright denial.
In Guyana as always and everywhere, there is a pressing need to attack all bureaucracies which have become cosy and self-perpetuating and so reduce centralised interference and so release individual initiative and energy. The eagerness to publicise whenever possible that “things are happening” is a sign that the heart is in the right place. But things will happen that much faster the quicker the cosy bureaucrat becomes an endangered species throughout the society.
