He himself could not be there (busy with training things somewhere probably), but the ghost of the civil servant who was sent out by higher authority to obstruct obstruction, passed through the room in which Groningers were heard by the parliamentary committee of inquiry for gas extraction. Mostribbelen, former minister Pieter Winsemius called the trick: ‘People talk to you, but don’t give a damn.’
Three well-cast witnesses appeared on Monday: Herman de Muinck, who was there as a little boy when the gas was found, 80-year-old Sijbrand Nijhoff, who could see from his horses whether an earthquake was coming and became a tough opponent of the state, and Susan Top, who has spent years trying to make things better for her fellow sufferers.
All three told how they had been lured into the labyrinthine that the government and Shell/Exxon have created, where they found government representatives at every turn who chatted with them but didn’t give a damn. Susan Top told how officials set up claims procedures in a way that minimized the hassle for the government. The hassle was for the citizens, who had to go from counter to counter and only saw this: delay, it seemed on purpose. Nijhoff put it nicely: ‘I thought we lived in an honest country.’
There are always reasons why the state does what it does: bigger interests, bigger money, bigger lobbies, incompetence, inability, stupidity. But why individual officials are cooperating in destroying civilians and shattering trust in their own government, while seeing up close that things stink, is an intriguing question.
She was also posed in the childcare allowance drama. Officials saw what happened, some spoke about it, a brave woman wrote it down. Higher hand talked along and didn’t give a damn.
Still, officials are really concerned when they have to implement insane or destructive policies. While Herman Muinck said he hopes for ‘justice’, I took the results of a survey about ‘moral questions’ among civil servants in various parts of the government from the website of the House of Representatives. Conducted by the I&O Research office for the Dialogue and Ethics program of the central government, which is intended to ‘strengthen the ethical capacity of civil servants’.
I looked up to the results: more than half of the respondents regularly had ‘tummy ache’ or ‘moral doubt’ about policies they should implement. They see decisions that are ineffective and do not serve the public good, because they are distorted under political pressure and power. They see decisions that turn out to be unjust, from ‘it sometimes seems more like bullying’ (with environmental permits) to ‘categorizing and making asylum seekers suspicious’, officials say in interviews conducted by I&O. They see orders from their minister to withhold information or adjust figures ‘so that a purchase could go ahead’. They often say something about it, but this rarely leads to satisfactory results. The key is: a courageous leader. (See again the benefits scandal, where you had to look for moral courage among executives with a magnifying glass).
On Monday, the Minister of the Interior sent the investigation to the House of Representatives, hidden behind a letter about ‘working safely’. While you might think: open the shutters completely. Because it would have helped the people of Groningen if civil servants had dared to say with a stomachache: we’re fucking it. Instead of talking and doing nothing.