Hong Kong bureaucrats’ response to report on lead-tainted water is buck-passing at its finest
Alice Wu says ‘systemic failure’ is just an excuse allowing officials to escape blame for the scandal. Sadly, this refusal to be accountable will only breed public cynicism
Perhaps it’s only to be expected that when the authors of the independent investigation into the lead-tainted water scandal in Hong Kong concluded that the fiasco was “a classic case of buck-passing”, it was met with an official response displaying the ultimate form of “buck-passing”: Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s decree that no single official should be held personally responsible for a crisis caused by systemic failures.
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Somehow we knew that if we left it to the bureaucrats, they would insulate themselves from failure. They have somehow managed to mangle what German philosopher Max Weber saw as bureaucracy’s “special virtue” – impersonality – into a monster. Impersonality is a virtue in Weber’s world, because “under the principle of sine ira et studio (without scorn and bias), the more bureaucracy is ‘dehumanised’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation”. Once upon a time, impersonality made bureaucrats efficient; now, it’s “non-human”.
Water Supplies Department bears brunt of responsibility for scandal
The Water Supplies Department faces the bulk of criticism in the damning report. It was criticised for its inadequate understanding of the World Health Organisation guidelines it adopted in 1994.
Of course, an inanimate object doesn’t “understand” WHO guidelines; actual people can. If someone at the department couldn’t comprehend a guideline, then it’s most definitely human error. Someone – not something – was incompetent in his or her job.
While Lam found no intentional breach of rules or abuse of power on the government’s part, that’s no excuse. Her brazen words were bureaucratese of the most despicable kind. Ignorance may not be a crime, but surely the public has a right to expect bureaucrats to have a certain basic level of competency in carrying out their duties.
To tell those who have had to drink tainted water because a “collective” of individuals failed to do their jobs – and that since there was a bunch of them, they can high-handedly excuse themselves from any individual responsibility – is a classic display of arrogance.
