Gravel in the Machinery of Bureaucracy

Investing in the Azores is invariably a delicate matter.

Delicate because we do not wish to bruise an insular economy already fragile and considerably worn down by years of abuse.

We are encouraged, therefore, by the news that the Government of the Azores, through the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), acquired a robotic surgical system for the Regional Health Service, representing an investment of two million nine hundred thousand euros (€2,900,000). It is undoubtedly a necessary piece of equipment—one that could only have been purchased with external funding of the kind made available through the PRR.

Likewise, through that same program, the Regional Government inaugurated a modernized building to house the new Health Center in the parish of Maia, on the northern coast of São Miguel Island. The project cost three million two hundred thousand euros (€3,200,000)—a difference of merely three hundred thousand euros when compared with the robotic system acquired for the hospital.

All this unquestionably represents a judicious use of PRR funding. If these resources are not employed, opportunities will be lost.

Investment, whether public or private, is always welcome.

An emigrant returned to his native land and invested approximately three million euros in property and houses in the municipality of Nordeste. He took every precaution to consult the relevant authorities and submitted the plans and architectural drawings for what he intended to undertake.

Four years later, nothing has yet been approved by the Municipal Council. The bureaucracy lodged within the appropriate municipal office remains utterly immovable—a sealed wall against which every effort has broken.

Another case is unfolding in Água Retorta, involving the restoration of an old manor house purchased by Azorean emigrants.

The unjustifiable obstacles placed in their path are as bewildering as they are unreasonable. The delays seem endless: years consumed by waiting.

Under such deliberately convoluted circumstances, it defies common sense for Azorean politicians to visit diaspora communities, community centers, or Houses of the Azores and proclaim incentives designed to entice unsuspecting emigrants into investing in their homeland.

We have cited only two examples. Yet there are many investments stranded in the mire of an autocratic burro-cracy—an asinine bureaucracy ruled by the imperious logic of “I want, I can, and I command”—practiced by certain municipal employees woefully unprepared for the positions they occupy.

Those who wish to return to their homeland cannot be treated differently from those investing in a multinational hamburger or fried-chicken franchise—or, indeed, in an international hotel chain. The law must be the same for everyone.

We know, however, that there also exists the law of money: a power capable of slipping silently through closed doors and accomplishing what was said to be impossible. This is passive corruption, difficult—if not impossible—to prove: the discreetly offered envelope, the concealed kickback.

These officials, long habituated to pouring gravel into the machinery of bureaucracy, must be removed from such positions. If they cannot be dismissed for just cause because they sit comfortably within the permanent civil-service establishment, they can at least be transferred to another department.

Send them to the libraries, for example.

(Translated by Diniz Borges)