Want something done? Get your hand in your pocket and offer a bribe

CAIRO // Spoken in hushed tones or even loudly with brazen indifference to anyone else overhearing, the phrase "kul sana wa enta tayyeb" can be heard every day throughout Egypt's sprawling government bureaucracy.

It literally means, "Every year and you are good", and it is traditionally used as a greeting for birthdays and other celebrations. But when the phrase is heard while standing in queues in government offices, it is also the unmistakable euphemism for soliciting or offering a bribe.

"It has been going on for so long that it is now part of the culture," said Marwa Sabah, an Egyptian businesswoman and anti-corruption activist. "It's embedded. It can be five Egyptian pounds (Dh3) to get out of a traffic ticket or one million for a business licence."

There is no way to determine definitively when small-level bribes became commonplace in Egypt, but they are now endemic from the top to the bottom of the government, corruption experts say.

The new government that has come into power after Hosni Mubarak was forced from office in February 2011 has not yet given anti-corruption offices fresh clout or simplified the labyrinth that is day-to-day administration in Egypt.

The huge, drab Mugamma building abutting Tahrir Square is a favourite symbol of Egyptian bureaucracy, and is featured in several films that lampoon the marathon waits in queues and the proliferation of paperwork, rubber stamps and officials.

In one, Terrorism and Kebab, a man inadvertently grabs a guard's gun and takes control of the building in a metaphor for the exasperation that many Egyptians feel over their soul-sapping, dehumanising encounters with the bureaucracy.

Low government wages and the sheer amount of time required to get things done in the Egyptian bureaucracy are major causes of low-level bribery, experts say.

"I can tell you from my personal experience that high-level corruption stopped by about 70 per cent after Mubarak resigned," said Hussein Hassan, an anti-corruption expert at the Cairo office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. "Most of that was done by ministers and the second layer below them. Now, those people are afraid to do anything because they can be held accountable. But the petty corruption is the same - or worse."

Low-level bribes can be found being exchanged for services in driver's licence renewal offices, property registries, and even the admissions departments of universities.

But in Egypt's under-policed, helter-skelter environment, armed men on the outskirts of Cairo also force factory owners to pay "protection money", Ms Sabah said.

"Every month, they come asking for payments and if you don't give it to them, your factory could be in serious trouble," she said. "Either these men will raid your factory themselves or let another group do what they want."

The problem in Egypt, she says, is that low-level bribes have been paid for so long that people would not know how to go about getting anything done without them. If a "kul sana wa enta tayyeb" request is refused, your paperwork is immediately consigned to the bottom of a mountain of files.

Nowhere is this image more clear than the Mugamma building, where torrents of people flow in and out of cramped hallways six days a week. Asking directions of a guard is often met with a laugh. It seems like no one knows where anything is or how to get what you need. Men and women push against each other at glass kiosks throughout the building, thrusting their paperwork two or three at a time into small openings to the bureaucrat on the other side. Even when you do find the right person, it usually requires multiple follow-up trips often met with the reply: "Come back next week."

That is unless you subtly offer a side payment to an official.

"Most people see it as cutting corners, getting around the system and not as a huge problem in Egypt," Ms Sabah said. "If you don't do it, you could be standing in an office for seven hours just to get a small task done."

"The only way to get rid of it is to completely start over and change the system from top to bottom."

bhope@thenational.ae