According to a study by the Institute of Public Administration, 69 percent of civil servants in this country stay away from work for no valid reason while 54 percent come to work late. The study said administrative measures, mostly verbal warnings, against absentees and latecomers have proved ineffective and that the heads of department rarely check if their staff keep their working hours.
The most alarming part of the study relates to employees in the health sector, many of whom were found to leave work early. When asked about the role of the supervision and investigation board, 25 percent of the employees said the board does not investigate the performance of civil servants, 46 percent said it sometimes does while only 28 percent said it investigates regularly.
If there is one thing that the study reveals, it is that our civil service is crippled, incompetent and unable to run state affairs. This results in people’s rights being compromised, payment of their dues delayed for months, their complaints and grievances ignored and neglected to the extent that no action is taken for years. Many people simply give up.
I was thus not surprised when I read in a local newspaper that a Saudi citizen spent three decades shuttling between the municipality and the office of a notary public to get the approval for a title deed in order to register a plot of land he bought to build a house on. Another citizen was also unable to register his land because of some discrepancy in the wording and numbers on the official documents. A third lost his title deed because an order to resurvey the land was never carried out until the land was annexed as part of an expansion project.
These are just a few cases of how our civil service functions. There must be countless cases like these where people’s rights are lost in offices suffering from entrenched bureaucracy.
