Bureaucracy often gets a bad reputation because of the slow processes, endless paperwork and frustrating inefficiencies that are an inevitable part of it. But what if the problem is not bureaucracy itself, but how it is structured and managed?
In November 2023, the UAE government launched its Zero Government Bureaucracy programme, a bold initiative to cut red tape and streamline government services. The results have begun to fructify, with recent assessments highlighting the best and worst-performing departments.
With 2,000 unnecessary procedures identified for elimination and service delivery times set to be slashed in half, the initiative is an ambitious step towards making government more efficient and citizen-friendly.
But elsewhere in the world, including in Argentina and to some extent in the US, more drastic measures have been taken, such as eliminating large parts of the bureaucracy. Which begs the question as to whether such measures risk undermining the very systems that ensure accountability and stability. The challenge is not whether bureaucracy should exist, but how to make it work better.
The UAE, with its visionary leadership, has achieved tremendous progress in its public service delivery, business climate and institutional development, and has opened itself to experimentation. It is, therefore, well-positioned to be a global leader in optimising bureaucratic efficiency.
While the UAE’s digital transformation and AI-enabled initiatives are critical to optimising its bureaucracies’ outcomes, we must not lose sight of certain fundamentals that are essential for their efficient functioning. Addressing inefficiencies requires tackling root causes rather than simply treating the symptoms.
As an academic and researcher of organisations and management, I believe the key to making bureaucracies work lies in refining their design and ensuring competent staffing, rather than dismantling the model entirely.
All large organisations, whether government or private, are bureaucracies by default, in terms of their operating structures, reporting channels and sometimes inflexible functioning styles. Over the years, bureaucracies have become synonymous with inefficiencies, delays and meaningless rules, rather than institutions delivering seamless services.
Unfortunately, it is not practically possible for large entities to completely dispense with the bureaucratic model and its features as they exist today. This is because there is no alternate form to this model, to manage large, complex organisations.
Getting rid of the bureaucratic model is neither feasible nor beneficial. This leaves senior executives with two choices
What is possible, however, is to use the model better and make bureaucracies more efficient and accountable. Bureaucracies are by themselves not inefficient. It’s the people who make them so – first, by incorrectly designing them, and next, by staffing them with incompetent employees.
Bureaucratic functioning would significantly improve and costly restructuring exercises avoided, by selecting senior executives through competitive processes, demanding accountability for their actions, remunerating them adequately, ensuring stability of tenure, and creating systemic organisational checks and balances.
Bureaucracies often fail due to disregard for the original model’s key principles established by its founder Max Weber, who pioneered modern bureaucratic theory, and outlined key principles for bureaucratic effectiveness.
Briefly, these include the selection of competent staff through rational processes, assigning them tasks based purely on expertise, having well-defined hierarchical management systems with clear communication channels, career advancement being contingent upon qualifications and achievements, and the equitable treatment of all organisational members.
An effective bureaucracy operates in a professional, impartial manner, free from favouritism and inefficiency. The degree of bureaucratic efficiency achieved is usually proportionate to the extent these basic principles are observed or flouted within organisations.
Merit should override favouritism. Incompetent senior bureaucrats ensure their security of tenure by hiring incompetent subordinates. Over time, this generates organisational inefficiencies that are then attributed to the bureaucratic model, than to the incompetence of those operating the model.
Bureaucracies also fail when basic design principles such as spans of control, authority and responsibility, and unity of command are disregarded. These are vital, though old school.
Internationally renowned scholars Paul Adler and Morris Fiorina had extensively researched bureaucracies globally. While the former claims that properly designed and staffed bureaucracies can be highly innovative and efficient, the latter identified six categories of “bureaucratic failures”, attributable more to political factors than trained bureaucrats. I endorse these claims, having worked in responsible positions within large, efficient bureaucracies.
While Singapore’s public services showcase what efficient bureaucratic models can deliver, the same can be said of Tanfeeth, the local shared services organisation, as well as Amazon’s operations based in the UAE.
As humans, we often forget the past. Recall that this century’s global economic meltdown mainly owed to large corporations’ anti-bureaucratic measures, such as the minimal use of regulations, checks and balances, filtering layers, secrecy and highly centralised authority. While such measures speed up decision-making, they also expose organisations and stakeholders to significant risks.
The 19th-century English politician John Dalberg-Acton once famously said: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Well-designed bureaucracies help prevent such situations.
Bureaucracies are not perfect, and initiatives aimed at eliminating their inefficiencies should be welcomed. However, getting rid of the bureaucratic model is neither feasible nor beneficial. This leaves senior executives with two choices.
Either continue to live with inefficient bureaucracies and complain about them, or refine and manage them proactively, to enhance their efficiency while maintaining necessary safeguards. The solution is not elimination, it is optimisation.
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
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Quick pearls of wisdom
Focus on gratitude: And do so deeply, he says. “Think of one to three things a day that you’re grateful for. It needs to be specific, too, don’t just say ‘air.’ Really think about it. If you’re grateful for, say, what your parents have done for you, that will motivate you to do more for the world.”
Know how to fight: Shetty married his wife, Radhi, three years ago (he met her in a meditation class before he went off and became a monk). He says they’ve had to learn to respect each other’s “fighting styles” – he’s a talk it-out-immediately person, while she needs space to think. “When you’re having an argument, remember, it’s not you against each other. It’s both of you against the problem. When you win, they lose. If you’re on a team you have to win together.”
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
UK-EU trade at a glance
EU fishing vessels guaranteed access to UK waters for 12 years
Co-operation on security initiatives and procurement of defence products
Youth experience scheme to work, study or volunteer in UK and EU countries
Smoother border management with use of e-gates
Cutting red tape on import and export of food
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
