State of/in Crisis (original) (raw)

The government and the people are one body. If one of its limbs fails to do its duty, the other parts of the body will suffer. Sultan Qaboos on his accession to the throne (1970) Driving down the Muscat Expressway at high speed, Hamad, a 25-year-old private consultant, and I were on our way to a lunch meeting at Fauchon, a popular French restaurant near the Royal Opera House. Skillfully maneuvering on the busy expressway, Hamad spoke about the café's "many excellent dishes and desserts." It was when he reached the topic of macaroons that we encountered heavy traffic on the road. Hamad began to slow down, as it became clear that there was a traffic jam ahead, and soon we came to a complete stop. Not yet used to Muscat's daily gridlock traffic, I asked Hamad why we stopped. Grumbling while gripping the steering wheel, he said: "You don't know? Most of these people are government employees rushing to get home." A former government employee in the Ministry of Transportation, he explained to me that the end of the workday for government workers was at 2:30 pm, but most of them left earlier. Laughing, he pointed to the lines of white Toyota Land Cruisers, Hyundai Accents, and Nissan Sentras in front of us. When I looked at my watch, I noticed it was only 1:30 pm. Unprovoked, Hamad launched into a tirade. He explained to me that Oman was in the state of crisis, because of the "selfishness" of government employees. He drew a parallel between the paralyzing traffic and the Omani bureaucracy, as both came "to a halt" and negatively impacted government performance. Shifting gears, he lamented how because of the collective action of a "handful of individuals," the private sector also experienced "major pain" while dealing with the Omani bureaucracy. He said to me: "you can be trying to submit the correct paperwork to start a business or something, but you keep failing. And why you ask me? It is because the [government] 14 As a new state logic that interacts with and transformed by the local context and not as a fixed set of attributes with predetermined outcomes, see Aihwa Ong, 2007. "Neoliberalism as Mobile Technology." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32(1): 3-8. 15 Works from anthropology and geography have demonstrated that the state has been absolutely central to recent economic, political, and social transformations that unfold on multiple scales (e.g., capital mobility, labor flexibility, tariff reform, new articulations of citizenship and state sovereignty, new subjectivities, etc.