In a society, the activities of the public and private sectors coexist, each one acting within the scope of the rules. However, the public activity does not rely usually on the private sector for the performing of its functions. On the contrary, the private sector depends somehow on the public support in order to grow and develop. There has certainly been progress in the services of the Moroccan public sector today in comparison with twenty years ago. That said, every food processing industrial must have experienced, one way or another the scorn of some state officials who refuse to answer to your post mail or email and / or don’t answer correctly your questions and / or sometimes they force you to come to see them for exchanging orally while requiring that you do as they wish in a written form and a thousand other unlawful processes to sustain their dominance (their illegitimate income) over the functioning of the country’s economic activity. These are practices that we call denigration for the purposes of this article.
It is easy to slandering in the case of impunity
In the mid nineties, after delivering to the Court my judicial report of laboratory tests on what was then called the wheat of India, a senior official of the Ministry of Interior had called my laboratory and asked that I come and see him in Rabat. I was greeted affably and the official put me at ease by offering me a cup of tea. He then showed me a note, signed on behalf of the Minister of Agriculture of the time, showing the points of the agenda of an interdepartmental meeting to be held the next day. One of the discussion points was on my named person (Dr Ahmed Essadki) with the word “subversive“. In this respect, the senior official reassured me regarding the position of his Ministry and presented me an engineer to whom I had to give comprehensive and detailed information on the work in my report submitted to the court and I did. This was, as I understood, for the objective of giving them concrete elements to be exchanged, as appropriate, in case the officials of DPVCTRF (Direction de la Protection des Végétaux, des Contrôles Techniques et de la Répression des Fraudes) of the Ministry of Agriculture would ask for kind of questions. The latter seems to have taken a dislike to me for having refuted their views on the issue raised in court.
The story reported above is a simple example, among many others (see various articles in this blog), and symptomatic of the spirit of disparagement of some officials of the Moroccan administration for the work of others, especially in the private. This is, to me, a sad legacy of the French colonial era. Indeed, according to the rules established for a second assessment, it would have been more rational to demonstrate first of all by laboratory tests that my work was not objective and only after go into conclusion that my behavior was a subversive one and not proceed by “putting the cart before the horse.” But this approach is considered as inappropriate and unworthy by civil servants inspired by work practice (left by the French) of the central administration of metropolitan France that requires obedience and submission from citizens before the diktat of officials which always have reason due to the fact that they are the representative of the State that is never wrong. This article reviews some experienced or closely observed situations to see how the jargon that says that Moroccans are only good for supporting roles, the first one must go for French people because we are borrowing for a moment their language, is confirmed by Moroccan experience especially in the business of agri food.
Discomfort in the use of our own language
I remember when I joined; as a junior researcher, Hoffmann-La Roche, the Spanish housekeeper of the building, property of the company, advised me add immediately next to my name on the mailbox the “PhD” symbol to avoid confusion. I later learned that the practice was part of the employer’s general recommendations to ensure peace and comfort of its researchers like the encouragement of the use of English in the place of work to ease communication between the seven thousand employees of the Basel Company. Later, in the late eighties, when I wanted to create my own company in Casablanca, and do for this the tour of some local public offices, I was advised to talk to the officials of my country in French to ensure that they do not demean my status. It’s heartbreaking because no citizen of a European country speaks in a foreign language to officials of his own country as a means to protect his social status. In this respect, while I was receiving at the request of the Court, under the instruction of a contentious issue, opponents of a conflict, so to intersect events, I realized a difficulty of communication between the opposed parties. The representatives of L’Oreal (accused), a woman and a man French citizens wanting to speak their language on one side and the complainants, a Moroccan woman and her husband British citizen and wanting the two to communicate in Arabic. At the end of this meeting, I informally asked the French citizen how long she was living in Morocco, and his answer was: ten years. But, she added: “I do not speak Arabic because everyone speaks French with me!” So, not only are we guilty of not sharing enough in our language, but in addition we bear apparent responsibility of discouraging French people to communicate with us in Arabic!
What about in the agrifood
After being sworn as expert witness, that in January 1984, I had sent a circular note to the courts of the Kingdom by providing them with my knowledge and a laboratory equipped to test for food processed products. At the time, there was the 13-83 Act (since repealed in 2010). This law authorized service Fraud, as part of their inspections of national agribusiness companies, to test food samples taken and, if challenged on their operations, to do the work for a second assessment themselves. The Multinationals found this a strange situation in the eyes of international practice but there was only this inherited law (in substance) of the protectorate. Under these conditions, once a company was pinned by the services in question, it was always (barring a miracle) condemned by the Court of First Instance and had to wait until the case goes on appeal, several months to see several years later, to trying to make his point of view (my files). And if in the meantime there was a tender issued by a state agency, the company in question was excluded to participate given to her “temporary” conviction by the court which greatly irritated the multinationals because they were hands tied against this infringement to international regulations. The pressure was very strong on the Casablanca Court of Appeal to find a solution because ultimately it is the court that convicted even if all the work was done upstream by Fraud. So, in a courageous and unprecedented decision, the first President of the Court of Appeals of Casablanca at the time, Mr. Hammou Mestour, has ordered that they send to my office all records where there was a dispute between fraud and businesses and there were lot indeed. In this respect, in asking to each of the companies to formally give me their views on disputes against Fraud, I, sort of, half-opened a Pandora’s box that allowed me to notice the status of advanced decay of our control system and supervision of our agribusiness and the behavior of officials fraud similar to that of the “Cosa Nostra” (my files). It is also likely that the delays to date in the implementation of the new 28-07 Act of food safety is the result of actions by former executives of DPVCTRF that still are in charge within ONSSA (Office National de Sécurité Sanitaire des Produits Alimentaires). Officials at the time ruled like absolute master of agribusiness and did not tolerate any word over theirs. They fleeced everyone if they wanted and repressed a stubborn operator with the processing of a file they sent to the court like they did in middle ages when they sent someone to the scaffold. In this context, of the hundreds of letters that I sent over several years as a judicial expert to an official or other of the mentioned structure (DPVCTRF), LOARC (Laboratoire Officiel d’Analyses et de Recherches Chimiques), the ONICL (Office National Interprofessionnel des Céréales et Légumineuses) and other state services, I received, weeks or months after sending my letters, less than five “answers” in the form of obscure language and therefore of no use to the objects of my mail. While practices I saw were archaic and oppressive, the judges were not aware that they pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the benefit of Fraud when they systematically condemned companies in first instance. The idea then came to me to compile the comments as a reference book for the use of magistrates which I then distributed free to various courts of the Kingdom to make them attentive that their role was considered as merely a support for the 13-83 Act.
The ONSSA in all of this
Before adopting a new working practice, the FDA, and other comparable authorities, puts the text online and give possibility and time to stakeholders to express their opinion, criticize, amend or propose better ideas before final adoption of the new approach of work. We do not see this with ONSSA who prefers to adopt a regal behavior in the matter (see: Dispute on a health certificate ONSSA). But trying to avoid the confrontation of ideas, the agency only perpetuates the practices of the defunct 13-83 Act. In the same vein, when, coincidentally, I witnessed an irregular and irresponsible behavior of representatives ONSSA in a hotel in Casablanca (my files) and then took the trouble to put all the elements the incident in a letter sent by fax to the General Director of this authority and reported these facts afterwards to the Minister of Agriculture, there has been, to date, no response of any of them. Since there has never been a response to letters I send from time to time to ONSSA on similar facts. So, in my opinion, if someone thinks that improvement of professional behavior of officials ONSSA is just a matter of time, it will probably take much longer to wait before seeing this happen. The most reasonable approach would be to send home the former executives who exercised actual responsibilities within the DPVCTRF and the Directorate of Livestock of the Ministry of Agriculture in the period 13-83 of the repealed Act, with compensation for early retirement if necessary. This will be good for the ONSSA and at the same time will accelerate the implementation of the new law 28-07 of safety of food products. Otherwise, the French, who rely on the failure of our public service to return to meddle in Moroccan affairs again, must be rubbing their hands hoping that we will call them again to play a leading role and restore order in our vital productive sectors. The African countries themselves will eventually have doubts about Morocco’s ability to fulfill the leadership role that the continent would love to see him endorse.
