Stamping out corruption

Colonel Fatah did not set out to have this recognition. Instead, it seems that an official from a respected anti-corruption agency was waiting in line for a passport and heard the Colonel telling his employees that he would not tolerate bribery of any kind in the office.

A social responsibility

But his views on corruption, which are notable insofar as he blames larger social factors like poverty rather than the moral failings of individual people, make sense when you see how hard he works to run an efficient office. It becomes clear that petty corruption would just slow down his system. He says "there are many forms of corruption....coming in late to work is a kind of corruption, a manager who doesn't know how to do his job is corruption." He lists off several other kinds of "corruption" and what they all have in common is a drag on his workflow. "We work until 6-7 pm at night because if we don't get the job done we'll be burdened by it the next day," he explains.

When he took the job about a year ago the main problem was there were no blank passports in the office. A company in London was supposed to provide them but they had run out. That was the first challenge. Then of course, the Colonel needed to make sure the office was staffed with a team of good, trustworthy workers. He seems driven by the desire to run his department well, and it helps that he also feels passionate about facilitating Afghans in traveling. "We have had a lot of war in this country; Afghans need to see other cultures, see how other people live," he says.

Applicants waiting for their passports said that, indeed, there is no corruption here. "I've never given any money to anyone here to get a passport back faster," says one. But this same applicant revealed another problem with the passport system which isn't computerised and therefore difficult to reference - this young man had multiple passports under the same name.

Future improvements

The reason for having these illegal multiple passports is, as the Colonel explains, because rival nations India and Pakistan will not allow Afghans with visas from the other country to enter. Afghans get around this with multiple passports. This is easy to do because even though Colonel Fatah's office keeps hard copies of paperwork and photos of all passport holders, they are not in a computer database and searching through hardcopy files would be unthinkably difficult.

Nevertheless, a computer database is being developed, and in the meantime Colonel Fatah is setting an example in a very sincere, down-to-earth way, of the rewards of working without corruption. One of the telling attributes of his office’s process is a system by which applicants do not pay directly for their documents, but instead pay a government bank which in turn issues a receipt. This presumably cuts down on the exchange of money at the passport office and therefore the opportunities for improprieties.

Although tough on corruption, Colonel Fatah is not necessarily tough on the offenders. "Society is like a family,” he says. “If a family member is corrupt, the people that surround him should try to make him a good person."