March 13, 2007
I recently returned from a trip to Paris. After working and living in Morocco for 23 months, I was amazed by the efficiency and orderliness combined with aesthetics in everything around me. The French have perfected the art of being French. But in addition, it must be noted that over two centuries of torpid administration, the French have absolutely perfected the bureaucratic system. Every government worker knows precisely his place and job description, who he can condescend to and who can condescend to him, and who the next pencil pusher is to shuffle his papers to. And it is precisely the system of government that the French were happy to instate in their North African colonies. The bureaucrat to citizen ratio in Morocco was 24 times higher than what the British utilized in one of their own cumbersome, shameful colonial playgrounds, India. But the days of colonialism are, in all practical terms, finished. So what happens when you put in place this same rigid, authoritarian system of domestic governance without the parallel structure of informed personnel and efficient physical infrastructure? You guessed it: Morocco. Even after Independence in 1956, the returned king Mohamed V must have been green with envy at the wonderfully hierarchical system that France used since he retained basically all elements of the top-heavy government. Save one important change: his complete and unequivocal authority. The result is what the Moroccans and the world’s few remaining kingdoms like to call a “constitutional monarchy” or as I prefer to call it – a “royal bureaucracy”.
The first task that all volunteers must accomplish when beginning their service is obtaining a carte de séjour, a temporary national identification card for foreigners. The process serves also as a Peace Corps volunteer’s introduction to disheveled bureaucracy. For some reason, however, national identity cards for country bumpkins like myself are handled by your local gendarmes’ office. Gendarme, like all Moroccan bureaucratic terminology, comes from the French, meaning “armed men (gens d’armes)”. The term is centuries old, its meaning changing to reflect the mode of transportation used to maintain law and order in the hinterlands of French territories from Bourbon to Brazzaville. From the mounted policemen of yore to Jeep-cruising officers of today, they are the ubiquitous hand of the centralized bureaucracy for a much decentralized population. If you saw the grey-suited jolly fellows in the movie Babel, you have seen them protecting and serving.
I walked into the gendarmes’ modest office on a warm June morning. It consisted of an empty waiting-room/paper-pushing-terminal and several other offices kept well out of sight. There were no other civilians waiting, but a diminutive officer was seated at said terminal – a school boy’s wooden chair and folding desk – methodically stabbing his index fingers into the keyboard of a circa-1940’s typewriter, like talons into flesh. Every fifteen seconds or twenty letters, which ever came first, he thrust a filter-less dark tobacco Casa cigarette in between his yellow teeth, cocked his head back to exhale and with equal aggressiveness, extricated it from his mouth and resumed typing. His was a contrived masculinity akin to crushing beer cans on your forehead. For about thirty-five minutes I sat in very awkward silence waiting to be acknowledged but he averted his eyes from those two central tasks. It was then that the sheriff walked out, an obtuse man of small stature (for a policeman) with a penchant for mumbling in several languages at a time in between periodic moments of spirited arm-waiving oration and yelling at subordinates. After our greeting we began the two hour process of filling out a form with essential information, such as my grandfather’s birth place and father’s place of secondary study.
Procuring a national identification card, he told me, also requires a battery of supporting documents in duplicate. Specifics were not an option. I asked the officer, “How many pictures do I need to get my card?”
His eyes lit up and he proclaimed, throwing his arms into the air, “A bunch!!”
“How many is that?”
“Tons!”
“Could you give me a number, please?”
“I don’t know! 12 maybe, or 15, just bring a lot!”
All of this effort was eventually requited when I returned several days later with 16 photos, ten copies each of four different documents, an official stamp and three more hours of time to kill. It seemed they had recently acquired a PC and were eager to see what it was capable of. Even with the synergistic effect of five officers huddled around the new office computer it took at least 45 minutes to have my form typed from the handwritten copy – a paragraph of approximately eight lines in length. The gaggle of budding technical writers spent the better part of an hour passing around and dictating from the sheet, arguing about how many spaces to leave between words (one usually will do but you can leave three or four for dramatic effect) and the exact spelling of “Boston” (precisely why democracy could never succeed in the Middle East). All the while, my heart pounded against my chest, but not because I feared any legal troubles. With five brutes trying to commandeer a keyboard, the image of a near-completed paragraph being obliterated and having to start from scratch gnawed away at my equanimity. It seemed that no one had taught them that you could save files; the title “Document1” at the top of the page taunted me from beginning to end of the transcription.
After watching the brute squad discover the joys of printing, it seemed like I was relieved of the royal bureaucracy. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and excused myself, hoping to receive my annual identification card sometime in the next eight months. But two weeks later I received a phone call from a frantic officer demanding that I come at once. He had forgotten to subject me to the most sacred step in the bureaucratic process: validating my documents at the town hall.
In the military world, an officer’s credentials are gauged by how much brass adorns his jacket. But in Morocco, a bureaucrat is judged by how many rubber stamps he has in his/her desk. Any bureaucrat worth his salt has at least two (note to reader, how many rubber stamps do you have at your behest?). These stamps or cachets are the bane of every Peace Corps Morocco volunteer’s experience. Any official document (identification card documents, travel permission, vacation forms, money transfers, etc.) is considered completely invalid, naked, null, void, even offensive, until it has been adorned by several cachets. Government workers or fonctionnaires are meticulously trained like Pavlov’s dogs to react solely to the awesome power of a rubber stamp. Produce an official document at a government office that does not feature the correct number of red stamp marks, and your fonctionnaire will immediately become catatonic, unable to lift a pen, move his chair or even speak until you return with a barrage of red circles and rectangles.
The well-trained Moroccan bureaucrats are absolutely dumbfounded that Peace Corps and their volunteers do not have their own stamps. To them, all of our dossiers carry as much value as Monopoly money. Once, while having a friendly conversation with the local hospital director, I asked him for his contact information. He grinned from ear to ear and reached into his desk. Was it to give me his business card? No, he stamped my notebook; that particular stamp contained his cell number and address. You could say that was his “business casual stamp”.
It would not be honest commentary if I did not acknowledge the apparent benefits of bureaucracy, and they do exist. If you ever become entrenched in this sordid, leaky, bloated system of governance, make bureaucracy work for you! I never have and never will pay anyone off to get a service done. However, I am willing to exploit the fact that ordinary Moroccans are bred to cower in the face of authority in its many shapes and forms. Even the most peripheral functionaries will act in haste to follow through with the orders of a superior. Once, when hosting a long-anticipated and well coordinated event at the local Youth House, we arrived on the first morning to find the doors locked. An urgent call from one of my Moroccan colleagues, Tariq, came in, “Good morning. We have a little problem with the custodian. He doesn’t want to work this week so we can’t get in.” I was enraged by this, especially since the custodian sat in on our meetings to help us develop the schedule. Tariq suggested a solution: go to the mayor’s office with a letter of request, massage his sense of self-importance until he rubber stamps our letter and call up our errant custodian with an ultimatum. Upon receiving our call, he knew just what to do.
The first task that all volunteers must accomplish when beginning their service is obtaining a carte de séjour, a temporary national identification card for foreigners. The process serves also as a Peace Corps volunteer’s introduction to disheveled bureaucracy. For some reason, however, national identity cards for country bumpkins like myself are handled by your local gendarmes’ office. Gendarme, like all Moroccan bureaucratic terminology, comes from the French, meaning “armed men (gens d’armes)”. The term is centuries old, its meaning changing to reflect the mode of transportation used to maintain law and order in the hinterlands of French territories from Bourbon to Brazzaville. From the mounted policemen of yore to Jeep-cruising officers of today, they are the ubiquitous hand of the centralized bureaucracy for a much decentralized population. If you saw the grey-suited jolly fellows in the movie Babel, you have seen them protecting and serving.
I walked into the gendarmes’ modest office on a warm June morning. It consisted of an empty waiting-room/paper-pushing-terminal and several other offices kept well out of sight. There were no other civilians waiting, but a diminutive officer was seated at said terminal – a school boy’s wooden chair and folding desk – methodically stabbing his index fingers into the keyboard of a circa-1940’s typewriter, like talons into flesh. Every fifteen seconds or twenty letters, which ever came first, he thrust a filter-less dark tobacco Casa cigarette in between his yellow teeth, cocked his head back to exhale and with equal aggressiveness, extricated it from his mouth and resumed typing. His was a contrived masculinity akin to crushing beer cans on your forehead. For about thirty-five minutes I sat in very awkward silence waiting to be acknowledged but he averted his eyes from those two central tasks. It was then that the sheriff walked out, an obtuse man of small stature (for a policeman) with a penchant for mumbling in several languages at a time in between periodic moments of spirited arm-waiving oration and yelling at subordinates. After our greeting we began the two hour process of filling out a form with essential information, such as my grandfather’s birth place and father’s place of secondary study.
Procuring a national identification card, he told me, also requires a battery of supporting documents in duplicate. Specifics were not an option. I asked the officer, “How many pictures do I need to get my card?”
His eyes lit up and he proclaimed, throwing his arms into the air, “A bunch!!”
“How many is that?”
“Tons!”
“Could you give me a number, please?”
“I don’t know! 12 maybe, or 15, just bring a lot!”
All of this effort was eventually requited when I returned several days later with 16 photos, ten copies each of four different documents, an official stamp and three more hours of time to kill. It seemed they had recently acquired a PC and were eager to see what it was capable of. Even with the synergistic effect of five officers huddled around the new office computer it took at least 45 minutes to have my form typed from the handwritten copy – a paragraph of approximately eight lines in length. The gaggle of budding technical writers spent the better part of an hour passing around and dictating from the sheet, arguing about how many spaces to leave between words (one usually will do but you can leave three or four for dramatic effect) and the exact spelling of “Boston” (precisely why democracy could never succeed in the Middle East). All the while, my heart pounded against my chest, but not because I feared any legal troubles. With five brutes trying to commandeer a keyboard, the image of a near-completed paragraph being obliterated and having to start from scratch gnawed away at my equanimity. It seemed that no one had taught them that you could save files; the title “Document1” at the top of the page taunted me from beginning to end of the transcription.
After watching the brute squad discover the joys of printing, it seemed like I was relieved of the royal bureaucracy. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and excused myself, hoping to receive my annual identification card sometime in the next eight months. But two weeks later I received a phone call from a frantic officer demanding that I come at once. He had forgotten to subject me to the most sacred step in the bureaucratic process: validating my documents at the town hall.
In the military world, an officer’s credentials are gauged by how much brass adorns his jacket. But in Morocco, a bureaucrat is judged by how many rubber stamps he has in his/her desk. Any bureaucrat worth his salt has at least two (note to reader, how many rubber stamps do you have at your behest?). These stamps or cachets are the bane of every Peace Corps Morocco volunteer’s experience. Any official document (identification card documents, travel permission, vacation forms, money transfers, etc.) is considered completely invalid, naked, null, void, even offensive, until it has been adorned by several cachets. Government workers or fonctionnaires are meticulously trained like Pavlov’s dogs to react solely to the awesome power of a rubber stamp. Produce an official document at a government office that does not feature the correct number of red stamp marks, and your fonctionnaire will immediately become catatonic, unable to lift a pen, move his chair or even speak until you return with a barrage of red circles and rectangles.
The well-trained Moroccan bureaucrats are absolutely dumbfounded that Peace Corps and their volunteers do not have their own stamps. To them, all of our dossiers carry as much value as Monopoly money. Once, while having a friendly conversation with the local hospital director, I asked him for his contact information. He grinned from ear to ear and reached into his desk. Was it to give me his business card? No, he stamped my notebook; that particular stamp contained his cell number and address. You could say that was his “business casual stamp”.
It would not be honest commentary if I did not acknowledge the apparent benefits of bureaucracy, and they do exist. If you ever become entrenched in this sordid, leaky, bloated system of governance, make bureaucracy work for you! I never have and never will pay anyone off to get a service done. However, I am willing to exploit the fact that ordinary Moroccans are bred to cower in the face of authority in its many shapes and forms. Even the most peripheral functionaries will act in haste to follow through with the orders of a superior. Once, when hosting a long-anticipated and well coordinated event at the local Youth House, we arrived on the first morning to find the doors locked. An urgent call from one of my Moroccan colleagues, Tariq, came in, “Good morning. We have a little problem with the custodian. He doesn’t want to work this week so we can’t get in.” I was enraged by this, especially since the custodian sat in on our meetings to help us develop the schedule. Tariq suggested a solution: go to the mayor’s office with a letter of request, massage his sense of self-importance until he rubber stamps our letter and call up our errant custodian with an ultimatum. Upon receiving our call, he knew just what to do.
