Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies
First, someone abuses their power
It starts with someone throwing their weight around. Abusing their authority.
An official bullies people, applies rules selectively, or treats public authority as a personal franchise. Someone gets pushed around because the official can apparently get away with it.
You object.
Perhaps it happened to you. Perhaps it happened to someone with fewer resources and considerably more to lose by making a fuss.
You gather the evidence and write a complaint. This is South Africa. We have a constitution, oversight structures, and entire departments apparently devoted to ensuring that other departments behave themselves.
Surely someone will want to know?
You remove “what the actual fuck?” from the opening paragraph and press send.
The institution detects a problem.
You.
Ag shame. You brought facts
I retain a touching belief that a clear argument supported by evidence should produce a relevant answer. A PhD and a lifetime in South Africa have apparently failed to cure me of this.
You explain what happened. Attach the documents. Identify the abuse of power.
You may even prepare a table.
Then you encounter dumb insolence.
We did not receive your complaint. Please send it again.
You did not send it to the right person. Please send it again.
We thought this was a duplicate of another complaint, so we closed the file.
We assigned your complaint to Mr X, but unfortunately, he has retired. Please send it again.
Then, when you persist, your question receives an unrelated answer. You explain why it is unrelated. They repeat it, with the patient expression of someone teaching a Labrador to use internet banking.
You cannot establish whether they fail to understand, refuse to understand, or regard understanding as a dangerous precedent.
But the instruction stands. Their authority remains intact. Your evidence has been noted.
This is what drives you mad: they can leave your argument unanswered and carry on exercising power over you.
Power gets to act immediately. Reason must make an appointment.
Before we discuss your complaint
The resistance machinery starts examining the person who complained.
Have you followed the correct channel? Is your documentation in order? Are you authorised to raise this? Have you complied with the relevant requirements?
Some requirements may be perfectly legitimate. Actual defects need fixing. They do not make the original abuse disappear.
Nevertheless, you must establish your own administrative purity before anyone can possibly consider what you raised.
The institution has discovered a missing attachment. You have not filled in the required form correctly. This receives rather more attention than the evidence attached to everything else.
Sara Ahmed’s research on institutional complaints explores this reversal: people who challenge a problem can themselves become the problem to be managed.
You arrived asking someone to account for their conduct.
You are now accounting for yours.
Welcome to Kafkaesque treacle
Then come the requirements.
You satisfy one. Another emerges. You ask for the complete list so you can deal with everything together.
Further guidance will be provided.
You ask whether complying will allow the original complaint to proceed.
That depends on the outcome of the process.
Who decides?
The appropriate authority.
When?
In due course.
You have entered Kafkaesque treacle. Every attempt to extract yourself requires another movement that sticks you more firmly to something else.
I call this performative bureaucracy: the elaborate performance of diligence and accountability through processes that can leave an abuse of power untouched while exhausting the people who challenge it.
The administrative activity is real. So are its consequences for you.
Your time disappears. Your ability to act shrinks. You spend evenings deciphering requirements whose relevance nobody feels obliged to explain.
Meanwhile, the original complaint sits somewhere beneath the paperwork, quietly decomposing.
The matter is receiving attention
South Africa supplies a magnificent vocabulary for this performance.
Stakeholder engagement. Appropriate structures. Constructive participation. Matters receiving attention.
You know you are in trouble when someone says, “we must allow the process to unfold”. Something is about to take two years, and it will almost certainly require you to bring your own pen.
Sociologist Robert K. Merton described goal displacement back in 1940: rules intended to serve a purpose become ends in themselves. South African bureaucracy has had plenty of time to perfect the technique.
Meetings occur, but no minutes are produced. There is no record that concerns were raised. The next meeting starts afresh, and the deficiencies you addressed at the previous meeting are raised again.
You ask whether anyone has dealt with the abuse.
There are concerns about your unwillingness to engage constructively. The way you handled it was inappropriate.
Perhaps your latest email sounded irritated. It was irritated. You have explained the same thing repeatedly while watching the discussion migrate towards the alleged defects in your personality.
“What the actual fuck?” returns to the draft.
This time, you leave it there until after supper.
Playing the marlin
A fisherman need not overpower a great marlin immediately. He controls the line.
He lets it run. Applies pressure. Gives a little. Reels some back.
The fish does the exhausting bit.
The institution controls the timetable, agenda and conditions of engagement. You supply the effort.
Another submission. Another carefully assembled argument. Another magnificent run.
Still attached to the same boat.
There is a slight imbalance in the arrangement. Officials administer the process during working hours. You fit it around earning a living, looking after your family and occasionally trying to enjoy being alive.
They can hand the file to a colleague.
You retain the entire bloody experience, including the correspondence archive and the involuntary twitch when someone says, “going forward”.
Eventually, the prospect of an ordinary Saturday becomes more attractive than another weekend preparing documents.
You withdraw.
The record can now show that further engagement was offered and declined.
The fish has apparently chosen to stop swimming.
Perhaps it is working beautifully
We tend to describe this as dysfunction.
Consider the outcome. The original abuse remains unaddressed. Authority survives. The awkward person goes away. Others observe what asking questions costs.
For some purposes, that is an excellent result.
No mastermind is required. Institutional loyalty, fear of embarrassment, laziness, malicious procedural obsession and deliberate obstruction can all pull on the same line.
There is a further benefit for the institution: people with an independent streak may eventually stop participating. Those comfortable with the arrangements have rather more reason to stay.
You can gradually discourage scrutiny while continuing to advertise opportunities for public participation.
Naturally, there will be an attendance register.
Meanwhile, I approach retirement intending to read, travel, walk the dogs and spend less time arguing with people whose salaries arrive whether they answer me or not.
I have considerable advantages. Money, education, time and the freedom to be a nuisance. I wonder how anyone without them gets through this treacle.
Then someone will abuse a little power and explain, with breathtaking assurance, why this is perfectly acceptable.
I will open a new document.
Delete “what the actual fuck?”
Prepare a table.
It will be another excellent letter.
The boat will be exactly where I left it.
Until next time
Bruce
