Aiwa (yes) minister

AHMED tries for days to complete the government paperwork to transfer his children to a new school. It is no easy task. On one occasion the bureaucrat he needs to see is on holiday; another time he is in the toilet. Frustrated, Ahmed ends up in a scuffle and accidentally takes a guard’s weapon and several hostages. The event is entirely fictional—it is the plot of a 1993 Egyptian film, “Terrorism and Kebab”—but the difficulties it depicts persist today.

Real-life examples fit for comedies abound. Paper-shufflers in Iraq insist that citizens list their birthplaces as that of their fathers, regardless of where they were born, causing no end of trouble. When one Iraqi tried to change his son’s name, a legally permitted process, he had to go to court 18 times to accomplish this minor revision. Lucky for him he wasn’t trying to start a business in Egypt, which by some reckonings requires permits from 78 different agencies. Things are so bad that this year one Egyptian minister joked about blowing up the civil service with dynamite.

Citizens the world over complain about red tape and pen-pushing bureaucrats. But those across the Arab world have more cause for complaint than most. Dictators and one-party states have long treated the civil service far more as an employment agency for loyal supporters (and family members) than a provider of services.

The effects are dire. Funding these armies of desk jockeys eats into national budgets, diverting skilled workers from the more productive private sector and depressing economic growth. In some parts of the oil-rich Gulf, for instance, more than half of all working nationals are employed by the state (see chart). The World Bank reckons that bureaucracies in the region are bigger (as a share of total employment) than in any other part of the world. Many of these employees “do no work at all,” says Hala al-Said, a professor at Cairo University. Promotions are based on age or connections, not merit. It is hard to be fired, even for incompetence. Absenteeism is widespread, not least because no one is doing any monitoring of performance, says Zaid al-Ali, an academic at Princeton.

The inefficiency of Arab bureaucracies matters to more than just frustrated citizens. The uprisings of 2010 that toppled regimes in the so-called Arab Spring were as much a cry for services as for democracy. Yet the governments replacing them have been even less efficient in many cases, raising the risks of further upheaval.

Pressure to change is mounting. For months Iraqis have been protesting against corruption and a lack of basic services; in Lebanon people have taken to the streets to demand that rubbish be collected.

Several countries have announced changes. A law passed in Egypt this year contains sensible reforms, such as publicly announcing job openings, testing candidates and requiring regular performance reviews. Iraq, too, is trying to weed out corruption among pencil-pushers.

Yet few think the improvements will get off the ground. Already tax-authority workers and unions have protested against the new law in Egypt while politicians in Iraq are blocking change there. An attempt in Lebanon in 2005 to recruit senior civil servants on merit soon collapsed lest reform upset a fragile system that distributes jobs among various religious groups.

Instead of reforming from the top, countries may well have more success starting at the bottom by making bureaucrats accountable to citizens at a local level, says Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank’s chief economist for the Middle East and north Africa. He points to successful schools in the West Bank and Gaza where parents assess the performance of teachers.

Yet not every country will be willing to go down this route, mainly because it would entail a weakening of the state’s ability to distribute largesse to loyal followers. “The social contract where the state provided health and education for nothing and citizens were pacifist consumers is broken,” says Mr Devarajan. But so far, nothing has replaced it: not private-sector jobs and certainly not democracy.