open-door policy
Many ministries in the Mauritanian government have an open-door policy. The door is literally open. Last Wednesday I was in a meeting with a director of programs at the women’s ministry when an old man in a dirty boubou walked into the small office and held out his hand, mumbling. Rooting through my purse for change, I took a cue from the other women in the room and put a few coins in his palm. After he had moved on our meeting continued and I flashed back to another visit to this same office a few months back. A guy hawking baby clothes had walked in, raising his eyebrows and shaking a little pair of pants. That time, the directrice actually stood up and chased him outside, demanding that God shorten his life.
the door was open during the girls' conference, too
How can you get any work done in a place like this? The people-off-the-street problem is only number one. Then there is the fact that everyone who passes by in the hall must stop and greet whoever has come by on business, so a meeting that should take 20 minutes can drag on past the hour mark. At least there is tea. There is not a guard at the front door, or a receptionist, but someone thought it necessary to hire a tea boy, who makes rounds at the office distributing glasses.
The conversation we are having is in Hassaniya, because the directrice does not speak French. Nevermind that French is the second official language, and if you pick someone off the street there is a good chance they will speak three, four or even five languages in addition to French. This woman must have been chosen based on some other qualifications. Since I speak only French, my colleague fills me in on the conversation that stops and begins again, between phone calls and greetings from the hallway. My attention focuses on other things-the binders full of statistics that this woman will never read, the black flat-screen monitor under a layer of dust. Across the hall a woman seated at a desk rests her head on folded arms. There are two stacks of paper on either side of the desk, but that’s all. Two stacks of paper and her head, eyes about to close.
It’s no wonder that nothing works in the interior of the country. At the very top, someone filled the posts but forgot to train the workers. In the year I’ve lived in Nouakchott I’ve seen the government change twice. Each time the ministries have been shaken up, not bringing in new blood so much as changing the pecking order. Each time there is a sense of complete disorientation, as well-connected people with little or no experience suddenly find themselves in a top spot. Those who deserve the promotions bicker about being overlooked, and those who may have just figured out how to do their last job now grapple with a new job description.
The first time I came to this building-actually the Secretariat d’Etat à la Condition Féminine-it was to discuss the program of the upcoming Annual Girls’ Education Conference. I was alone at this particular meeting, and the director had arrived over an hour late. I explained how things would work, asking for their assistance with the opening ceremony and a discussion on women’s rights. For ten minutes she looked right through me, and nothing I said registered. Was my French this bad? Finally she introduced me to someone she said would help, and I thanked her for her time. A few hours after our meeting, my boss Bagga called. The CF had gone through some changes that morning, he said. It turns out that when we spoke, the director had just come from a meeting in which she had been demoted to the point of insult. A few days later, I was back in the same office, giving the same talk to someone else.
Another round of changes came about a week ago as the result of presidential elections last month. It will take a couple of months for everything to get settled enough to the point where work can actually be done. I’m optimistic that this will be the last sudden change for awhile. But it will take months for the management to begin to reverse years of neglect. It took the CF about three months last fall just to assemble the names and numbers of its current regional representatives, of which there are 12. As a seriously under-funded “Secretariat d’Etat,” the CF could pay a bare minimum to these representatives, many of whom had no idea what they were supposed to be doing (and so did nothing). From Nouakchott, they were only vaguely supervised. Now a real ministry, the CF might use its new funding to actually pay its employees and train them to help the women in this country, who have it pretty bad (According to unreliable statistics, about 2/3 are illiterate). Then again, the CF might follow the example of other ministries, buying a lot of cars to allow officials to go make irrelevant observations during costly, week-long “missions” to the interior… You never know.
At the very least, they ought to be able to hire a guard.