One of the most
striking observations about Jordanian governmental culture is our public
servants’ unwavering ability to get comfortable with mediocrity.
اضافة اعلان
Any encounter,
however small, is bound to leave one with a heavy feeling, probably from
dealing with recurring public-sector under-performance that has perfected the
art of dragging its feet.
We have an expression
in our Jordanian dialect that sums up the attitude of many ministers, mayors,
heads of departments, and employees across the
governmental hierarchy: “Doing a
half-sleeved job.”
With this attitude,
thousands of public servants march into their offices early in the morning
every day (in a pandemic-free world) to reproduce the same tired and
uninspiring culture that we have all gotten accustomed to.
“A half-sleeved job” is
almost a mantra that has been dictating everything from big decisions, to how a
window clerk handles your paperwork, with the boredom and lack of zeal you’d
expect from someone who truly and wholeheartedly hates his or her job.
Though some may argue
this propensity to mediocrity is not real corruption, I’d like to humbly offer
a counter argument that regards mediocrity as a form of severe and dangerous ethical
corruption.
The kind of moral corruption that leads to abuse of power,
self-enrichment, and nepotism.
In both Islam and
Christianity, we seldom remind people, on a mass scale, that “work is worship.”
No one has ever bothered explain to us this principle at any point in our
school or university lives.
The concept of “honest work” requiring
full-heartedness, conscience, resolve, attention to detail, and self-observation
and reflection, is completely left out from our educational culture.
Because of this lack
of moral education, we are cursed with fleets upon fleets of governmental
employees who are conscience-dead enough to use their salaries as an excuse for
not doing an excellent job for their countrymen and women, for their homeland,
and for their God!
In all honesty, nothing
can break a conscience that walks the straight and narrow, not even a meagre income.
This Machiavellianism has
somehow made it to the mass consciousness of the nation, in numerous ways, over
the past few years.
Living a morally upright way of life used to be second
nature to my late grandmother’s generation, who have endured wars, famine, and
unbelievable stories of displacement and oppression.
But for today’s
Generation Z, and the Millennials before them, the sense of entitlement, to
what they haven’t worked hard for, points to a severe collapse in our ethical
and moral education.
Whining about a poor salary, not having the latest
smartphone model, and not eating out every single day of the week, have become
the very excuses many use to tank their jobs, and allow their conscience to,
slowly but surely, die.
To further justify
their lack of commitment, those who adopt this defeatist outlook are also good
at backing their claim to an easy, conscience-free life by comparing Jordan to
its neighboring countries, and their completely collapsed social and economic
systems.
This helps them slip into as many comfort zones as possible, as they
self-congratulate for not being part of a worst case scenario.
For a full picture of
our current reality, let us not forget the other type of “half-sleeved”
officials, who are blessed with a better education than most, come from larger
families, and make better income, yet produce utterly mediocre results.
Another
proof, income does not make the man, or woman.
As it happens, there
is a slight difference between the mediocrity of those occupying top official
ranks (the civil servants), and those at the bottom of the governmental ladder,
aka the public servants.
The ones at the top
have their over-inflated egos, cigars, status-related perks like frequent dinner
invitations to functions by apple-polishers eager to protect their interests,
meetings they do not have to take minutes-of-meeting for, and a workforce of
outsourced consultants to do their job for them.
The latter isn’t an
imaginary scenario. A consultancy firm I worked for a few years ago was once
contracted to create a power point presentation on behalf of a ministry's
secretary general, who, in his turn, was asked to complete the task on behalf
of his boss, the minister.
My supervisor and I, two private-sector workers,
created the slideshow detailing the ministry’s 5-year plan and strategy without
a single note or direction from the secretary general.
Our work was later
presented in the minister’s name at a cabinet meeting, presided over by a then-sitting
prime minister.
I can match the
aforementioned example with many other stories I have bore witness to; stories
that point to a deep form of government lethargy and an over-dependence on
local and foreign consultants to do their job for them.
We are often guilty of
assigning blame to the collective, in this case the government.
But the point I
am trying to make here is that for a certain trait to become collective, it
needs to start on the individual level.
It all starts with people’s daily
choices, before those accumulate enough to become a social phenomenon.
It all boils down to
one thing: Lack of “work ethic” on a very personal level.
As a direct product of
our school and university systems, I can confidently testify to the fundamental
role of our educational system in creating generations after generations of
demoralized individuals who just want to get by in life.
Who want to get good
grades for the sake of the grade. Who believe in the “means that justify the
ends” in most of what they do, and who often engage in opportunism, and even
cheating, to secure a good grade.
In school, work ethic was never a concept our teachers were too busy
trying to instill in our hearts and minds.
In university, the only class that
taught me a thing or two about work ethic was an essay-writing course that shed
some light on the ethics of writing without plagiarism.
My point is, to break the vicious cycle of governmental lethargy, we
need to start focusing on moral values, like work ethic, in our educational
institutions.
We need a complete paradigm shift in our learning systems, so as
to evolve from mere education to a higher-level of true “mentorship” that
instils moral concepts in the hearts and minds of students.
Maybe then we can
produce better governments, furnished with better quality public servants, who come
to work with the kind of attitude, conscience and loyalty that can save us from
our chronic mediocrity.
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