I have a confession to make – I love good administrators.
It’s true, I love modest, orderly and efficient fellow human beings who sit at their desks in front of computers and telephones doing their job properly from eight to five until they retire.
I have a confession to make – I love good administrators.
It’s true, I love modest, orderly and efficient fellow human beings who sit at their desks in front of computers and telephones doing their job properly from eight to five until they retire.
I love in particular, though not without a certain apprehension, a great glowering mama of an admin clerk who sits in front of a cliff of grey speckled lever-arch files in which invoice and receipt of a company is filed, together with each financial statement and minutes of each monthly meeting for I don’t how many years, who glares at you when you enter as if you know nothing about what really counts in life which she let’s you know she does, down to the last meeting, the final cent.
What she knows is what people need of each other and what organisations of people are prepared to pay for, with each exchange of value, each abstract flow of money swishing this way and that recorded as it happens, with every single exchange, every single transaction of substance sealed by the sacred seal of a signature and the date.
That’s what makes me so African I suppose, this extravagant admiration, this reckless praise for good administrators.
Who doesn’t curse out loud when a phone rings on and on in a government office during working hours, who doesn’t feel a secretly furious animosity when people who because of culture or oppression or another marathon meeting or whatever are not at their desks when you’re desperate for the sheriff of the maintenance court, a rates official, an ambulance, the town planner’s assistant or a water engineer?
People who, after you’ve queued for ages to reach them, cannot find a client’s docket, the doctor’s disability report, a refugee registration number, the social worker’s file, a municipal valuation, planning permission or rates clearance certificate, a title deed, an application for a passport or a permit to work.
Am I wrong to cherish a burning desire to see a great dream come true?
Is it unpatriotic to agitate for a pipe-line that doesn’t run dry, a hillside of houses built to last, a school where the kids receive their sandwiches each day, a suburb where the power stays on all year? All hail then to the administrators whose files are as neat as a pin, who come in on a Saturday morning to get up to date, who are just and efficient and merciful and good-humoured in their dealings, who don’t stuff around with the girls in the office, who don’t sneak a kick-back from a supplier into a cousin’s bank account or slide a tender application under the door of an avaricious uncle or friend.
I ask out loud, I embarrass my friends by asking, if honest and empathetic and diligent administrators are not the genuine comrades of liberation, the authentic cadres of democracy? I mean the real liberation of short, effective meetings organised into action and budgets and minutes by people who know how to make things happen and get things done, the sustainable democracy of decent companies that pay their tax and civil servants who get the boot if they fail to do their job.
So Viva! I say to the administrators who are efficient and humane despite the boring repetition of their tasks, the lure of bribes and the shambles of the ambivalent minds around them. Viva! to the administrators who are at their desks from early Monday morning to late on Friday afternoon, who cherish their asset-registers, their maintenance schedules, their transport-logs and financial reports with the passion of a loving parent for a vulnerable child.
And Viva! to the people who make the hospitals, the police-stations, the courts and schools and universities, the pay-rolls, medical-aid schemes and pension-funds happen, who keep the busses and trains, the pipe-lines, power-stations, electricity transformes and sewage-works working, who seal each completed transaction in a lifetime of just and effective transactions with the sacred seal of a signature and the date.
Chris Mann is the convenor of Wordfest and honorary professor of poetry at
Rhodes University. His latest book is Lifelines available from UKZN Press.
