This is What Bureaucracy Looks Like

A traffic accident reconstructed on a chalkboard. A diagram of traditional dress pasted askew to the concrete wall. Broken furniture, still arranged to invite a visitor to sit. 

These memory-jarring details, somehow both banal and exotic, are immediately recognizable as quintessential to Liberian official offices. Sandwiched between shots of young French paper pushers and a Siberian secretary sporting a perm are ten alluring portraits from Liberia, part of an extraordinary series of photographs, titled simply Bureaucracy, by photographer Jan Banning. The other countries in the series are Bolivia, China, India, the United States, and Yemen. Banning spent years spanning to globe, photographing hundreds of government officials, and her work was organized into a traveling exhibition and was published as a book in 2008.

The visits were unannounced, [we] kept the employees from tidying up or clearing the office. That way, the photos show what a local citizen would be confronted with when entering.

These head-on shots of Liberian civil servants, from the center of Monrovia to remote districts in River Gee County are familiar in ways heartwarming and hilarious, or even headache-inducing, to outright horrifying. Anyone who has spent any time in Liberia has been in rooms like this, sat in small, hand-made wicker seats, under a roof of rusting zinc or woven mat, painted cement floors or worse, covered in rolls of plastic floor matting. Banning and her partner's interview also recorded the official salaries of each, perhaps the most jarring detail of all. 

Banning's descriptions and photos are reposted below. Everything ©Jan Banning.

 Warford Weadatu Sr. (b. 1963), a former farmer and mail carrier, now is county commissioner (administrator) for Nyenawliken district, River Gee County. He has no budget and is not expecting any money soon from the poverty-stricken authorities in Monrovia. Monthly salary: 1,110 Liberian dollars (US$ 20, euro 19), but he hadn't received any salary for the previous year.
 

Major Adolph Dalaney (b. 1940) works in the Reconstruction Room of the Traffic Police at the Liberia National Police Headquarters in the capital Monrovia. Monthly salary: barely 1,000 Liberian dollars (US$ 18, euro 17). Traffic accident victims at times are willing to pay a little extra if Dalaney"s department quickly draws up a favorable report to present to a judge.


Alfred D. Tartea (b. 1946) is administrative assistant and acting superintendent (highest civil servant) of Careysburg district, Montserrado County. Monthly salary: 750 Liberian dollars (US $ 13, euro 12.50).


Alfred C. Garley (b. 1950), stationed in Zwedru, is deputy revenue agent for Grand Gedeh County. During the Liberian civil war, the tax office was robbed and destroyed. Monthly salary: approximately 1,000 Liberian dollars (US$ 18, euro 17).


Henry D. Snorton (1957) is senior tax collector in Kakata district (22000 people), Margibi County. He is co-ordinator of the district"s 12 tax collectors. They take in real estate tax and tax on trade profits, mostly in cash. "We have absolutely nothing: no decent office furniture, no telephones, no typewriters, not even a motorbike to collect tax in remote areas. Our collectors sometimes walk for a whole day to visit one taxable." Monthly salary: 925 Liberian dollars (US$ 16, euro 15).


J. Modesco Siaker (1959), township commissioner in Crozierville, Careysburg district, Montserrado County. Crozierville had 10,000 people before the war; now 4,000. In 1990, Taylor's rebels entered the village: "I was a clerk then, and they threatened to execute me and some others. They let me go, but killed 2 others." They ransacked houses and public buildings. In 1991, INPLF rebels (Prince Johnson c.s.) and Ecomog peacekeepers stole what was left. Since 1997, Siaker is back in his village. His office and home are in a derilict villa: the town hall was raised to the ground.Siaker cannot do much for his people. He earns 750 Lib. dollar (US$ 13, euro 12.50) a month.


Henry Gray (1940), acting commissioner for Gbaepo district, Kanweaken, River Gee County. During the Civil War, the office was completely looted and destroyed: only one wall remained. Gray has 11 personnel, of whom only 4 are paid. The rest are volunteers. He has no budget and over two years salary owing. Yesterday, he went to the capital Fishtown to collect last two months salary, two times 975 Liberian dollars (2x US$ 17, 2x euro 16). All he got was 600 dollars (US$ 11, euro 10). Gray is father to 34 children (sic), 13 of them depending, and has 18 grandchildren.


Lieutenant Samuel P.S. Kollie (b. 1955) is chief of the Traffic Station of the Liberia National Police in Kakata, Margibi County. He has no police car and no means of communication. When an accident is reported, Kollie at times takes a cab at the expense of the person reporting the accident. Monthly salary: 900 Liberian dollars (US$ 16, euro 15).


Louise N. Smith (b. 1964) keeps files at the Department of Statistics of the Bureau for Immigration and Naturalization (BIN) in Monrovia. Monthly salary: 1,000 Liberian dollars (US$ 18, 17 euro), almost all of which is spent on transportation to and from work. Sometimes she receives nothing for three months, except for support from family in the United States.


Brama F. Nyé (b. 1962) is head of the Revenue Office in Smell-no-Taste, Margibi County. Once a month, he drives in a rented or borrowed car to Monrovia to deliver hundreds of thousands of Liberian and American dollars to the Central Bank of Liberia. Monthly salary: 1,080 Liberian dollars (US$ 19, euro 18).


Caldwell: 188 Years Old And On the Move

From what I have told you  today, you now know that you reside in a very historic place.  So what is your duty to Caldwell, you new Caldwell dwellers?  Your duty is to contribute to Caldwell’s development.   You see what government is doing to help you.  Government is widening and paving your main highway, which I guess you may want to call Caldwell Boulevard,  leading to many other places.  Just this Thursday the Ministry of Public Works signed a contract with Chinese contractors to build a new two-lane bridge across the Stockton Creek! But during the signing ceremony Public Works Minister Kofi Woods told you that you Caldwell people that were refusing to clean the new paved streets. What kind of thing is that? You expect government to build the road for you and come and clean it,too?  If you continue this kind of lazy, irresponsible and unpatriotic attitude, you will never make history as your forebears, the earlier people of Caldwell, have done.  And your township will go backward, not forward.   Is that what you want? We Liberians are good at expecting the government to do everything for us, while we do nothing for ourselves.  And the little the government does we want to destroy.  Do you remember what happened at the newly constructed Zolu Duma Bridge across the Mesurado River in Vai Town?  Not only did the people throw litter along the bridge and into the river; they also stole the lights on the bridge!
 Yet these are the same Liberians who always complain that the government is doing nothing for them.  But let me tell you that INGRATITUDE isone of the DEADLY SINS.  God doesn’t like, people don’t like it, and you yourselves sitting under my voice don’t like ingratitude.  People who do something good for you would be pleased if you said “Thank you.”  But that is not why they did it for you, simply to be thanked.  People do it because they feel it is their duty to help others.  But they are encouraged to do even more when people show appreciation, not only with their lips, but in their lives, by demonstrating their appreciation.
 You can show appreciation for what the government is doing by keeping Caldwell clean, so that visitors or people passing through will say, “We would  like to visit Caldwell again,   because the people here are clean and they love theirtownship and take pride in it!”  

This is the attitude that will empower you to embark on the transformation of Caldwell into a beautiful and progressive Township and maybe one day, a City.       

The above paragraphs are but a small excerpt, with some emphasis added, from the remarks Kenneth Best, publisher and MD of the Daily Observer newspaper, which the newspaper's Facebook page reports he gave on 25 May 2013, on the occasion of the 188th Anniversary of the founding of Caldwell Township. Caldwell, one of the oldest towns in Liberia, having predated the country's independence by a quarter century, is now but one of Monrovia's several sleeper suburbs which form a sprawling arc to the north of the capital, in the center of Montserrado County, and are collectively referred to by locals as "Across."

Mr Best's speech gave a lengthy chronicle of this part of Liberia, detailing Caldwell's settlement and mentioning a great number of prominent family names associated with various waves of arrival to Liberia, and so makes interesting reading for anyone excited by the minor actors of the country's long history. 

The Observer post doesn't mention if the 188th anniversary celebration was more formally observed than more round numbers, but Mr. Best dares to ask, as the hamlet approaches its 200th anniversary, if its denizens dare to dream of one day being a real city:

Then the people will say that Caldwell is truly on the move, with all its people putting whip to horsetowards transformation into a modern city!