P.S. Sorry for the rant you can ignore this post. I’m just frustrated with the bureaucracy here.

I mean sure but these bureaucratic laws and practices are ancient. I come from Egypt and the bureaucracy here is terrible. To do anything government related you have you to free an entire day and some times almost a week from your schedule just to finish the paperwork and visit the required government offices. Why is that still necessary in the digital age.

When our government decided to digitise they didn’t upgrade their system they just added additional digital steps. So now the process has even more redundant steps. The issue is that the rules are too old and the system is too centralised and also fragmented. To get a single paper/request approved you usually have to go through multiple departments, offices and ministries each with their own rules, requirements and paperwork, while we have the infrastructure to just do it with a single paper, an ID and a biometric scanner and share the info between departments digitally. Also a system this complex has to have many loopholes and bound for corruption.

The argument I keep hearing for bureaucracy is that the government has to keep providing government jobs to reduce unemployment since a significant portion work in the public sector, but these jobs are useless anyway we can give some of them actually useful tasks and with the saved money we can put it to better the welfare system. Another argument is that you have pay multiple fees, but then you can also take these fees as a single summed transaction and save the time.

Where I come from the X thing wouldn’t be legally binding. What people who couldn’t read or write would do is using their fingerprints. They would put their finger on a stamp ink pad and then stamp the paper with their finger. That’s why we say “someone who uses their fingerprint” as a euphemism for “illiterate”.