Corruption or what?

We suppose that I live in a large and important country with a large civil service. It also has large armed services, but that is not relevant here. Civil servants who might work hard and well, but who do have nicely padded terms and conditions. Things like security of employment, defined benefit pension plans and sick pay. Maybe even prayer rooms and prayer time. Maybe even table football machines scattered around workplaces.

Suppose also there is a civil service department responsible for building and looking after the country's dolmens, structures like that snapped above from South Korea. For some reason I know not of, they are terribly important. The population at large is very attached to them.

But we then have a drive on waste in the public service and parachute in a businessman with large powers. He announces that the Department of Dolmens is just a bunch of wasters and sacks the lot, nicely padded terms and conditions notwithstanding.

A couple of days later, he works out - perhaps he knew all along - that we really did need the dolmens after all. Not a problem he says, sezzee. I just happen to own a company which does dolmens. And the people who work in it do not have nicely padded terms and conditions. They are lean and mean and will do a good job for a fraction of what it was costing. We will worry about the maintenance contract in slow time.

In many places this would count as a corrupt practise. The sort of thing that in parts of the world of the south, for example in South America, might get you impeached or thrown into jail.

PS 1: 'sezzee' being an allusion to the stories of Brer Rabbit, last noticed towards the end of reference 1. Maybe they are still alive and well in the southern states of the USA.

PS 2: in my old world of privatised government IT, maintenance was where the contractors made their money. Their build price was attractive and we did not pay enough attention to the change & maintenance contract which came with it and which, over time, was far more valuable. The contractors ran rings round us. They were much better at hustling and bustling than we were. I associate to the story of an eminent civil servant in the Treasury climbing up a ladder to put a star on the departmental Christmas tree, because even he baulked at the amount of money that the contractor with the building service contract was going to charge to do the job for him. It is not recorded whether he actually had to bring in his own ladder from his nicely padded suburban garden to do the job.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/after-windrush.html.