When was the last time you walked away from dealing with a government department or agency feeling satisfied and happy?

The same question could be asked of the countless city and town councils, statutory bodies and private concerns in which the government has direct or indirect control. The negative response would certainly be accompanied by an endless stream of personal grouses and unprintable expletives.

Our frustration with the arrogance, inaccessibility and inefficiency of government bureaucrats is all the more painful because there is no means of running away from them. Living and working in a soft authoritarian state as we do, reporting to a government counter or squaring up with an officious face behind a desk is as inevitable as taxes and death.

From our cradle to our grave, we are entrapped from head to toe within a web of rules and regulations. Every milestone in our life is marked with an official document of some sort that always entails endless trips to the long queues in front of an undermanned government counter, the filling out of thick senseless forms, the interminable delay, and the painful payment of various official or unofficial fees.

Entrepreneurs in the private sectors have learnt long ago that they must "know somebody inside" the relevant bureaucracy in order to get fair returns for their investment of money and effort.

I am not talking about really big businesses, or what are now fashionable referred to as the "corporate sector". That rarefied species operate at the level well beyond the ken of ordinary mortals like us, possessing as they seem to do the near supernatural power of penetrating the impenetrable armour of our bureaucratic machinery, right into the bowels of political power. There, "knowing somebody inside" carries a different connotation altogether.

Strange ontological view

For the masses of individual enterprising souls in the small-medium industries, their nightmare begins with the setting up of a business, dealing with the myriad "relevant authorities" that are given the powers to approve plans, carry out inspections, and issue various permits, licenses and letters of authorisation.

I am given to understand that a decent-sized hotel will require 60 to 70 different permits and licenses. Can you imagine the running around, the amount of useless correspondence and paperwork involved, and therefore the unseen costs of "knowing somebody inside'?

Then, God forbids if you should suffer from a unique personal or business problem that does not fit into the bureaucratic scheme of things.

Bureaucrats have a strange ontological view of the world. For them, the universe is organised according to their rules and regulations. If your problem does not fall into any of their existing categories of defined laws of various types, then your problem does not exist. Therefore, you do not exist.

Any enquiry on the telephone is out of the question. Either nobody ever answers the call, or you will be referred by a curt operator to the wrong departments for the usual run-around of musical extensions. In the end, the-officer-in-charge is almost always away on a meeting, or sick leave, or coffee break, or whatever.

A polite letter written in Bahasa Malaysia will draw the usual, standard, bland, meaningless responses. Your problem is being looked into, and you will be informed in due course. Your letter has been referred to a committee for further consideration. Your letter has been referred to an inter-departmental committee that has been set up to co-ordinate the many committees in the many departments that are all considering your problem. In short, your problem is always under "due" consideration, but no decision will ever be taken.

After a few futile excursions into the mystical world of officialdom, you finally come to realise the ultimate truth: in the Kafkaesque Castile that is the bastion of government bureaucrats, nobody knows anything, and nobody is responsible.

Bureaucratic civil servants

Some educated citizens think that they can punch through this batik curtain of inscrutability by holding to account the bureaucrats' political masters. After all, are these bureaucrats not civil servants who are paid from tax-payers' contribution to the national coffers, and therefore answerable to the elected government of the day?

The reality, however, is a little more complex. Senior mandarins at the highest level of public administration would like to think that they are the real professionals in this business of government. Ministers and governments come and go, at the whims and fancies of party bosses and a fickle minded electorate, but public servants will go on forever. They are really the ones who ensure the continuity and consistency of policies and administration.

Besides, ministers are politicians. Politicians, as we all know, are shady characters of dubious administrative capability. They are more likely to play to the gallery by squeezing themselves into media limelight with rhetoric and polemics through public announcements and opening ceremonies, rather than poring over the thousand and one administrative details that make a government tick.

Junior MPs who have just been elevated to the positions of parliamentary secretaries and deputy ministers, and even political veterans who have been given a new ministerial portfolio, will not have the haziest notion of the inner working of their ministry. These fresh political luminaries will be entirely at the mercy of their principal ministerial subordinates, who will feed them such information, recommendation and policy statements, as are deemed suitable and important.

Presently, a symbiotic relationship develops between the minister as master, and the bureaucrat as servant, and it is not always easy to tell who is which. They need each other for their careerist survival. When attacked by the public, they will defend each other.

One glaring example

A case in point is the recent waves of anger over police incompetence, following a spate of sensational crimes, especially that of Canny Ong's murder. No doubt the police department is one of the largest and the most powerful bureaucracies in the country, pushing us to the brink of being a police state. But the department has been rotting from within for decades, and is in dire need of an overhaul.

However, for righteous members of the public to call for the resignation of either the Home Minister or the Inspector General of Police is futile. Short of a change of government, the positions of both minister and chief bureaucrat are as immoveable as Mount Everest.

Note how the Home Minister has come to the rescue of his putative underlings. The police has failed to arrest crimes, he professed, because they are suffering from a shortage of manpower. The solution is for the department to recruit 27,000 more police personnel, and for Parliament to approve the required funding.

This is bureaucratic logic at work. The nation's economy may continue on a downward spiral, plunging most wage earners into a financial dire strait. The private sector may be bent on downsizing and cost-cutting. But the public service will grow on forever, consuming more annual public expenditure to pay for higher salaries, bonuses, and expanding manpower and equipment needs. You could say the civil service is always growth oriented!

What almost all citizens do not realise, is that the uncivil civil service is the most influential vested interest group in the country. Being the ones who actually fashion and guard the corridors of power, public servants have the first access to our nation's public resources.

Self-serving

Given the reality of inter-ministerial and inter-departmental rivalries that are the inevitable result of internal politics, bureaucracies are condemned to be self-serving. They are enslaved to eternal requests for more funding, more manpower and more hardware, on pains of losing their power and prestige.

On a superficial level, it is hard to refute the logic of bureaucratic language. After all, who can do a job well without more manpower resources under increasing public demand for services rendered?

But, alas, like God, our bureaucracy works in mysterious ways. More bodies employed does not necessarily mean more useful work done, because the bureaucracy is infamous for creating useless unproductive work.

It is ironic that Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson should work in the British Colonial office in Malaya in the 50s. Was it here in our homeland where he derived inspiration for his satirical commentary on bureaucracy in his book Parkinson's Law: The Result of Progress?

By now, the tenet of Parkinson's Law is well known. Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Granted that work (and especially paperwork) is thus elastic in its demand on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work done and the size of the staff assigned to it. A lack of productivity does not necessarily result in leisure, however, because the thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent.

This distortion of work and time comes about because of two motive forces behind bureaucratic modus operandi ; reduced to axiomatic statements, they are: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other."

The increase in the staff of any bureau therefore, will mean merely the exponential production of paperwork, the mountains of forms in triplicate, the minutes of numerous meetings, the infinite flood of circulars, memos and notices, the ever expanding need for letters of acknowledgement and reminder. All these documents will require even more staff at various levels, for the purpose of double-checking, authentification and endorsement. And so the bloating body of the dinosaur swells, without doing the people the slightest bit of good.

How many civil servants of various descriptions are there in Malaysia? A million give or take a few hundred thousands? The bare fact is that we Malaysians are already administered to death.

The whole thing would have been just laughable, if not for its adverse consequence on our national life.

The wastage of public funds is one thing. After all, we are more or less resigned to the human conditions that it is in the nature of all forms of government to waste public money.

Public morality

The public institutions of government administration, like banks, are viable only on the basis of unadulterated public trust. By virtue of their commanding positions in our social structure, these institutions also set the tone for the public morality of the entire nation.

When cancerous corruption has infected the entire body of our public service, and after the metastasis of private insatiable greed has crippled the vitality and energy of our body politics, is it any wonder that we are witnessing a steady decline in the moral standards of our daily lives? Do we have to look further for one of the plausible causes of our legion of social ills and crime waves, than this credo of Corrupt Leadership by Example?

Finally, an ever larger bureaucracy means the increasing concentration of power by the State over the civil society, towards the dubious objective of total social control. The inevitable results will be excessive centralised planning, over-regulation, and over-administration of the market. These will stifle innovation, initiative and even ingenuity in the private sector, and suffocate the national economy, which has already suffered irreparable injuries from the pervasive presence of government companies in all kinds of businesses.

More importantly, the omnipresence of a politico-bureaucratic administration - with the Big Brother presiding at the apex of this pyramidal power structure - will form an imagined straight jacket, imprisoning all the intellectual, artistic and spiritual energy of a talented people. We have been reduced to a nation of mere drones, entirely devoted to the stupefying deadening chores of animal survival, and capable of taking pride only in making the world's longest cake and such other inane petty achievements. There is no room for our real human need for real growth.

Cutting down this Big Government to size must be top on the agenda of any reform.