This week, an unusual but telling spectacle unfolded inside Bangladesh’s Secretariat.

Senior government officials, the very custodians of public service, staged a protest against a new ordinance designed to make them more accountable to the people they ostensibly serve.

The display has stirred public attention and unease, particularly from those who have long regarded this power center with a strange mix of fascination and fear.

At the same time, officials at the National Board of Revenue (NBR) are up in arms over a proposed bifurcation of the agency. It’s not hard to decipher the real anxiety: reform threatens routine. And routine, in the world of South Asian bureaucracy, is often indistinguishable from entrenched privilege.

I say this not as a distant observer, but as someone who spent five years navigating the bureaucratic maze– knocking on ministry doors at least twice a week. What these protests defend isn’t merely structure; it’s an unspoken hierarchy built on ritualized dysfunction.

Here’s how it works: most real decisions in ministries are made in meetings– not based on substance, but on where one sits.

There are about forty chairs in a standard room. Remarkably, officials who fail at procurement, planning, and project execution can still flawlessly identify the "correct" chair in this unspoken seating calculus.

Never once have I seen a mistake in this ritual. Rank, not relevance, determines placement.

The people with the least expertise often talk the most. Those who actually prepare the paperwork and execute the projects are relegated to the second row– voiceless, unless summoned.

And even when officials speak, their words are usually filler: elaborate greetings, name-checks, and recycled praise, all wrapped in a plea for the chairperson’s "guidance."

It’s a performance– and the more obsequious the script, the more likely the actor is to be promoted.

Yes, hypocrisy, nepotism, sycophancy, and fraud exist in many offices. But in the ministries of Dhaka, they are perfected. They are not bugs; they are features.

No one rises through the ranks on competence and integrity alone. If you cannot play the game, the position of Joint Secretary is as far as you'll ever go.

Changing colors

I remember one such official–Mizanur Rahman–then a Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government.

During the caretaker government era, he was a fervent supporter of the so-called “minus two formula” to exile both major political leaders. I once accompanied him on a project visit to Sylhet. There, he bounded up a hill with the energy of a man half his age.

But when it became clear the formula would fail and the Awami League might return to power, he had a revelation: suddenly, he was a freedom fighter. He began recounting wartime tales no one had ever heard before.

He even began claiming he had a gunshot wound on his ankle–an injury invisible to the naked eye but apparently severe enough for him to purchase a limp and a metal cane.

After the 2008 elections, the transformation was swift. Within months, he was promoted to Additional Secretary. Soon after, he was appointed Secretary of the Ministry of Liberation War Affairs–where he famously began distributing Liberation War certificates, including to himself.

He once asked if I wanted one. I had to decline on the grounds that I was born after 1971.

He awarded gold medals to Indian soldiers–only for the press to later reveal that the medals contained no gold at all. The international media ridiculed Bangladesh for this farce. But the deeper tragedy was not the embarrassment–it was how routine such fraud had become.

Mizanur Rahman was not an aberration. I’ve seen multiple secretaries follow the same script–rewriting their histories, aligning with whoever is in power, and monetizing patriotism as bureaucratic capital.

So when these officials take to the streets this week to protest reforms aimed at transparency, understand what’s really at stake: not the public good, but a system designed to reward allegiance over ability, theater over truth.

And until that changes, the people's government will remain anything but.

Incentive for the status quo

The most remarkable thing about this bureaucratic elite is not just how quickly they adapt to political winds–it’s how shamelessly.

If tomorrow Jamaat-e-Islami came to power, you can bet half of them would grow beards overnight and start whispering that they had long sympathized with Islamist elements, just quietly, in the shadows.

They survive not by serving the state but by shape-shifting through it.

And of course, they love to travel. Officially, it’s for “training.” Unofficially, it’s often little more than tourism subsidized by taxpayers.

Take one Secretary I worked with– a woman who took multiple international trips from the Ministry of Local Government to “learn” about low-income housing.

I was the project’s lead designer. She never once shared a report, a note, or even a passing comment on what she had seen abroad. We kept working in the dark, assuming she’d debrief eventually.

Then one day, I visited her office– only to find it was her farewell reception. She was being transferred to the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock. She granted me a few minutes. I asked, sincerely, “You’ve taken so many trainings on housing. How will that knowledge be useful in fisheries and livestock?”

She answered with solemn certainty, “Experience always helps, in some way or another.” A Deputy Secretary beside her nodded, as if this nonsense required validation.

This is not an anomaly. It’s the rule. Spend enough time around these ministries and you begin to understand: they don’t just tolerate dysfunction, they are calibrated to sustain it.

Career bureaucrats see this world of shallow ritual, fake expertise, and political elasticity as completely normal. And in time, even outsiders begin to treat it as unchangeable.

Politics in Bangladesh may rise and fall. Parties shift, alliances crumble, leaders are made and unmade. Even the Himalayas move a few inches when an earthquake hits. But the ministries? They remain untouched, unmoved, and impervious.

Not even a seismic figure like Dr. Yunus could shake their foundations. Politicians may come and go. But this culture–this system–has armored itself against reform.

And that may be the most dangerous truth of all.

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Aminul Islam Emon is an architect