Science fiction often provides a medium to speculate “what if” scenarios, taking contemporary trends and extending them or twisting them into future or alien world scenarios.  It’s therefore not surprising that, when it comes to government bureaucracy, all the historically traditional traits get played up into a satire of the public sector   ̶   the obsession with process and hierarchy, officiousness, obfuscation, and jargon-based gobbledygook.

The most commonly known depiction of bureaucracy in science fiction would probably be in the sci-fi comedy The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The story starts with the destruction of the Earth by the Vogons to make way for a Hyperspace Bypass   ̶   a sort of Marsa fly-over multiplied ten-fold.

When the Vogons arrive on Earth there’s no maniacal declaration, just a polite but indifferent announcement of the “regrettable” destruction of the planet; on a smaller scale in Malta, this would be equivalent to the destruction of Mdina by Portelli to build an 80-storey tower with “staggering views of the whole archipelago”.

This is followed by a stern lecture about the importance of taking an interest in local affairs   ̶  the planning charts and demolition orders having been on public display at the local planning department a mere four light years away on Alpha Centauri; in Malta this would be Minister Owen Bonnici berating citizens for not clicking on the Planning Authority website three times a day to check whether Portelli has filed a planning application for a building in Mdina, or simply destroyed the ancient enclave, built the tower, and then asked for regularisation of the illegality.

The Vogons, being the sole species that runs the Galactic Civil Service, are the personification of the most excessive traits of bureaucracy   –   albeit bureaucracy of the 1970s. They’re not necessarily evil, or corrupt, or incompetent. They are just ill-tempered, with an obsession for process over outcome.

The 2005 Vogons film showed that the visitors from Vogsphere were a more aggressive force than they were in the stage comedy, but it still left room to make jokes on the traditions of the public service and making public servants a source of comedy.

That infamous red tape

While a number of bureaucratic maladies have attained mythical stature over the years (such as goal ambiguity and structural inflexibility), red tape is perhaps the most pervasive and damaging overall.  The term ‘red tape’ has its origins in 16^th-century English local government.  Red tape is ‘rules, regulations, and procedures that remain in force and entail a compliance burden but [do] not advance the legitimate purposes the rules were intended to serve.’

This is, in part, because critics claim that red tape makes life hard for public employees and citizens alike and takes a heavy toll on the performance of public organisations. This is attested to by the widespread international literature on red tape and regulation by key policy organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  Some of the biggest bureaucratic machines in the world   ̶   for example, the European Commission   ̶   have published an extensive literature about their own bureaucracy.  Anybody interested in suicidal thoughts should delve into this.

What about the stakeholder?

The incentives in the bureaucracy are perverse.  Who in the hell in government really thinks about the stakeholder (the citizens or businesses relying on them) or anything else?  In a bureaucracy, a public servant thinks the work is done when it goes out of his in-basket into somebody else’s in-basket. But, of course, it isn’t. It’s not done until the Government delivers what it’s supposed to deliver.  So, you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies.

They also tend to become somewhat corrupt.  In other words, if I’ve got a department and you’ve got a department and we kind of share power running this thing, there’s sort of an unwritten rule: “If you won’t bother me, I won’t bother you and we’re both happy.”  Doesn’t this remind you of the debacle surrounding poor Jean-Paul Sofia’s death? 

One also gets layers of management and associated costs that nobody needs. Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They’re too slow to make decisions and nimbler people run circles around them.  Often this leads to committees and commissions which create their own bureaucracies to fight The Bureaucracy in an attempt to beat them at their own game.

Getting bureaucracies to behave

This doesn’t mean we don’t need governments and bureaucracies   ̶   because we do. But it’s a terrible problem to get big bureaucracies to behave.  Bureaucracy is terrible, and as things get very powerful and very big, you can get some really dysfunctional behaviour. Look at the hospitals deal. Millions of euros were paid to a crook who knew zilch about hospitals and health. The guy who paid him had come up by some career path   ̶   I don’t know exactly what it was, but it could have been a seller of the monopoly board game, though he was touted to be ‘a very capable manager’   ̶   and all of a sudden, the crook sells on the hospitals and disappears. In due time, the country lost all those millions of euros.

Of course, there’s no comedy in Sofia’s death or in the Vitals/Steward Health fiasco.  They were all too real tragedies.  But this week, we had one example which was absolutely comical.  It concerned a Gozitan resident and archaeology expert who found two prehistoric shark teeth in Victoria.  Dawn Adrienne Saliba has described her efforts to report the findings as a “mind-numbing bureaucratic labyrinth”.

The fossil once belonged to a megalodon, an extinct species of giant shark, and has been regarded as one of the largest and most powerful predators to have lived.  Close by, Saliba also found two small man-made caves cut into the limestone, which she thought could be centuries old.

Saliba had discovered the ancient remains in ongoing roadworks close to her home in Victoria. The roadworks are part of the controversial Marsalforn project to widen the arterial road and the development of another road to reroute traffic away from Victoria’s centre.  Of course, it would never dawn (sorry for the pun, Ms Saliba) on the bureaucracy that, down the road from Iċ-Ċittadella, in a valley which carries water to the sea at Marsalforn, there might be all sorts of fragments and remains which could be of historical interest.

Saliba wrote in the Times of Malta that she spent hours going back and forth between different entities trying to report the findings and the possible destruction of other archaeological remains.  She first called the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage but was told that this only monitors archaeological, not paleontological, remains.  Apparently, something like a 16-million-year-old megalodon tooth is not as valued as a 1,200-year-old piece of pottery.

She then called the Police, who informed her to call the local council.  The council told her they would read her complaint at the next meeting.  She then called the Ministry for Gozo, who told her to contact the Planning Authority.  She emailed the Planning Authority’s enforcement unit, who informed her that ‘roadworks do not fall under the remit of the Planning Authority’ and told her to contact Infrastructure Malta. Infrastructure Malta told her to go back to the Ministry for Gozo. She then called the Planning Authority again. This time, they took down the information and told her they would launch an investigation (God, I think I’ve heard that before a zillion times). In the course of a wasted five hours, the bulldozing continued, and “millions of years of paleontological remains were obliterated in an instant”, according to Ms Saliba.

What about the public good?

I sympathise with Ms Saliba’s frustration and anger.  Actually, I think I should apologise for describing this story as “comical”.  I should have said it’s a “tragedy”, certainly not on the scale of Sofia and Vitals but still symptomatic of how the public good is the least concern of the bureaucracy.

American President Ronald Reagan once said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”  This was well after Honoré  de Balzan had declared that “bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”  Not to forget that Leon Trotsky claimed that “bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.”

Bureaucracy is very time-consuming   ̶   for companies and for individuals. Many services, such as applying for any license or an identity card, involve in-person appointments, and just getting a slot can be difficult. According to the Bureaucracy Museum opened in Berlin last April, visits such as these in Germany take 2 hours and 21 minutes on average. And overall, small and medium-sized businesses devote on average 13 hours a week to their paperwork. I dread to think what it takes in Malta, which is certainly not as efficient as Germany.

For two months, the Berlin Museum showcased the quirks of German bureaucracy through satirical displays. The images of public servants on the one hand and bureaucrats on the other, revealed that the most important values and norms in the administrations of bureaucratic countries are not so much efficiency or being citizen-friendly or saving taxpayers money.  They are very often about implementing the rules and regulations.

The wheels of German bureaucracy may move slowly, but the pop-up Museum of Bureaucracy was not around for long.  It was consigned to history on 25 June, hoping to take a large chunk of red tape with it. Only time will tell if the €500,000 investment was well spent. 

Pity that the Maltese government did not buy it and rebuild it as a permanent exhibition in Malta, on the lines of Popeye Village.   

Main photo: Dawn Adrienne Saliba/Facebook