No matter how many times planners try to protect the administrative system from official misuse of power, they fail. Their failure is due to many poorly-qualified officials who lack both relevant and necessary experience. Some have come from academic life and others have used influential connections and friends to ignore existing rules and regulations. This means that most qualified employees have to do their jobs in the main offices and leave the outlying branches; such a thing is bound to impact negatively on plans for the decentralization of administrative work.
What is even worse is what happens behind closed doors when administration managers employ their relatives and friends or members of their tribes, awarding sensitive highly-paid positions to them. The result is a failure by the administrative branch because jobs are given to relatives and friends rather than to those who are qualified to do the job.
It is vital to restructure these departments to protect them from mistakes and misuse of power. We are bound to fail if we attempt decentralization by assigning qualified people to branches in return for taking qualified employees to the main center.
Arab News From the Local Press 26 August 2003
