Syria Today | Taming the Beast

Taming the Beast

Words Obaida Hamad
Photos Adel Samara

Syria’s administrative performance has long suffered from bureaucracy, corruption, dysfunction, shortage of well-qualified staff and the sort of inefficiency associated with Soviet-model central planning and control.

Improving the performance of the public sector has been a central goal of the government’s ambitious reform programme. High-level government ministers have consistently identified the need to streamline processes swamped in red tape, target corruption, upgrade staff training and improve the way government offices interact with the general public. While considerable progress has been made in reforming other sectors of the country – the financial services sector and education are two areas which stand out – moves to change the country’s public bureaucracy have progressed slower than many initially hoped for.

Syrian lawmaker Mohammad Habbash says the government has successfully implemented reforms in areas such as education, media and the economy, particularly the financial services sector. However, he adds: “The administrative situation in Syria is not good and we haven’t been able to implement much reform because of internal and external conditions.”

In 2000, when Western-educated President Bashar al-Assad took power, he launched an administrative reform campaign and established a Ministry of Administrative Development, chaired by Hassan al-Nouri, a British-educated Damascus resident who had not previously served in a government position.

According to Nouri, there has been some progress. Yet the results have been mixed: while some ministries and state-owned organisations have embraced the need for change, others are stuck in a business-as-usual mindset. He lays much of the blame for the slow progress on external pressure on Syria which has made it difficult to process internal reforms.

“I adore President Bashar because he not only supports and backs administrative reform, but is part of it and pushes for that,” Nouri said. “Our reform process was negatively affected by many external events that have reduced its speed.”

Less than hoped for

In 2003, the European Union, in partnership with the Syrian government, set up an organisation designed to advise the government on the administrative reform process. Although the project has an unwieldy name – the Institutional and Sector Modernization Facility (ISMF) – it has a simple goal; to analyse what isn’t working in Syria’s labyrinthine bureaucracies and make recommendations about how to improve things. “We are like doctors,” Ibrahim Yakhour, ISMF spokesman and anti-corruption campaigner, said. “We can diagnose a problem and we can prescribe a cure.”

The project, funded by a SYP 1.46bn (EUR 20m) EU grant and a SYP 109m (EUR 1.5m) contribution from the Syrian government, brought in foreign experts to work in tandem with locals. Scores of civil servants participated in the ISMF’s training schemes.

The goal of the ISMF has never been to force foreign practices onto government ministries and bodies. Instead, the working idea is for Syrians to absorb the lessons they think are most valuable and applicable to their circumstances. “We are like doctors and that means it is up to the patient to decide whether they want to listen to and act on our advice,” Yakhour said.

Always intended to be a temporary project, the ISMF was originally scheduled to end in September of this year. It has been extended, however, to the end of the year to allow for a fuller evaluation of its results. “Initial assessments were that some progress had been made, although perhaps not as much as had been hoped,” Yakhour said.

Resistance to change

According to local experts, Syria’s administrative reform faces many domestic obstacles. Abed Fadillah, a professor at Damascus University’s Economic Faculty, said the main problems plaguing Syria’s public administrative bodies arebureaucracy and corruption. Old laws and outdated routine measures create an inefficient public sector, Fadillah said. What’s more, many employees do not know the laws and decrees they are responsible for implementing, nor their implementation instructions, which greatly confuses simple government functions. Government employees deliberately slow the process down or make measures more complicated as a means of receiving bribes to speed things up. “Syria’s bureaucracy process is a base for corruption which spreads to all levels, particularly the low and mid levels of administrative bodies,” he said.

Another problem hindering the country’s administrative reform programme is the lack of a well-trained workforce. The government has moved to improve the quality of its public employees by establishing two institutes for training staff in modern skills of administration and management. The two organisations are the Higher Institute of Business Administration (HIBA) – quickly establishing itself as one of the region’s leading business schools – and the National Institute for Administration (Institut National d’Administration or INA) which is run jointly by Syria and France.

Both are generating a new cadre of young Syrian graduates keen to implement what they have learned and change the way the government does business. Their impact to date, however, has been muted in institutions slow and at times resistant to change.

“In Syria’s governmental departments, there is a struggle between two mentalities of work, the old traditional one which wants to keep everything in the hands of a director and the bureaucracy process, and the other one which is to give full authority to each employee to decide what is in the best public interest and do it,” Abdul Mina’am Bakour, an employee at the government-owned Syria Telecom and INA graduate in new management and administration skills, said.

Bakour said all senior civil service directors should be required to complete courses in administration skills to get exposure to internationally recognised modern management techniques.

The need for administrative reform in Syria is well understood by the country’s elite decision makers who have stressed economic growth is hampered by continuing government inefficiencies. While those involved in the reform process have repeatedly stressed the necessary grassroots transformation will not take place overnight, some analysts believe the country’s public sector reform programme is now at a crossroads – either strong efforts are taken to break down institutional resistance or all that has been achieved will be lost. “The question is will Syria move forwards, or will it simply slip back into its old ways,” Yakhour said.