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Brazil reeling under inept civil service appointments

The country's leading newsmagazine calls it "the most radical and voracious partisanization of the state bureaucratic structure" in Brazilian history. Since taking office at the start of the year, President Luiz Inacio da Silva has stuffed government ministries and agencies with political appointees, many of them unseasoned, and the country is now feeling the effect of their efforts to learn on the job.

Da Silva's Workers' Party had limited administrative experience, even at state and municipal levels, when it began to govern this nation of 175 million people. The result, critics contend, has been confusion and immobility, as thousands of posts have been filled with party loyalists.

Complaints of delayed and inefficient services are multiplying, and even with budget cuts, some government ministries are so unsettled that they seem likely to end the year unable to spend money allotted them.

"The Workers' Party has cre-ated a model in which militancy in the party or a labor union counts more than administrative experience or an academic curriculum," said Lucia Hippolito, a political scientist who has studied the bureaucracy for 20 years. "They've gone way beyond the policy-making level and deep into the management level with inexperienced people who do not know how to run the machinery of state and are committing one folly after another."

Party leaders reject accusations of incompetence and deny that any housecleaning or disruption of the bureaucracy has occurred. But they also say that in emphasizing political loyalty as a criterion for appointments, they are merely doing what other parties have done in the past.

"There has been no division of spoils or dismissals for political reasons," Jose Genoino, president of the governing party, said in an interview at the party's headquarters in Sao Paulo. "The state apparatus is functioning normally, and where we have made changes, it has been with people from within the civil service."

The egalitarian structure the Workers' Party has traditionally favored may be contributing to the perception of chaos, political analysts say. Da Silva has on several occasions been publicly contradicted by his own Cabinet ministers, whose own declarations have sometimes been rebutted by their subordinates, leaving doubt as to who makes policy and what that policy actually is.

"It is the logic of a social movement transferred to the structure of government, and that has grave consequences," said Edson Nunes, author of The Political Grammar of Brazil and a professor of political science at Candido Mendes University in Rio de Janeiro. "The Workers' Party doesn't recognize the idea of hierarchy, and since everyone is a comrade, you have a lack of command and rank and even of loyalty to the minister."

While da Silva's own popularity rating remains high, several recent polls indicate that the majority of Brazilians now consider his government to be "mediocre or bad."
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