Corruption, Care, and the Bureaucracy of Absence

Corruption is usually discussed as high politics. But one of its most consequential sites is inside the bureaucracy, in the ordinary procedures where licenses and permits are made or delayed. It’s easy—too easy - to read every hold-up, missing document, or shifting fee as proof that “the system is corrupt.” Sometimes it is. But drawing on Steven Jackson’s broken-world perspective—systems are always partly broken and kept going by everyday repair—the very places where corruption can take root are also where people repair the system, keeping it alive. This, I suggest, is also the case in Tanzania.

This is the paradox I track in everyday administrative practice. What I see, is that bureaucratic silence—what I call a bureaucracy of absence—does important bureaucratic work. An unsigned state document slows cash, shifts authority off the page and into negotiations, opens rooms for discretion, and at times enables corrupt extraction. At th same time, it pulls people into the bureaucracy -  calls, visits, WhatsApp messages, greetings, and reminders - durational care and repair that keep the file, and the bureaucracy, going.

The scene: a file that won’t close

Picture a completed license application on a municipal officer’s desk. It’s visible, but there’s no signature. In the digital portal, the file shows “in progress.” Nothing moves—and yet everything happens. Without that one signature, a firm can’t invoice, sign contracts, or pay workers on time. Cash flow becomes cash slow. From the outside, this looks like nothingness. But ‘nothing’ governs, the missing signature holds time open. With Achille Mbembe, this apparent nothingness isn’t empty, It is an everyday mode of rule and economic life we have to learn to see. Corruption and repair are two sides of the same pause.

How absence works

In Tanzania, as in many places where the colonizers imposed the British Westminster system, documents like permits applications are meant to end in a clear authorization. In practice, many files stay open. This is far from being unique in Tanzania. In Matthew hull’s work on Pakistan, such never-finalized files are described as “timebombs”. Signatures are withheld - not rejected, not approved, simply suspended. It slows down action by stretching the time between application and authorization. Time becomes elastic, and the pause lets officials choose what to do next. In this pause, bureaucratic authority shifts off the page and into discretionary practices, meetings and side conversations, where decisions are prepared elsewhere and sometimes later formalized on paper.

As we can see, the delay and waiting time is far from empty. It is also populated by people doing what I call presence-work: routine visits, polite greetings, “just checking in,” forwarding receipts again, sharing a passport photo with the right background color one more time. This is much much like Michael Degani shows in his work on TANESCO, where he shows how small greetings keep channels warm enough for procedures to continue. These gestures don’t resolve the case by themselves. They keep it – and the infrastructure – alive.

Dark worth—and everyday care

Suspension makes the cash side of the bureaucratic file the most opaque part of governance: where payments sit, what salaries cover, and how fees are set or altered are handled offstage, out of public view. In that darkness, rent-seeking and discretionary adjustments can occur—and sometimes outright corruption—but more often the effect is simple delay.

In a cash-poor, underfinanced bureaucracy, the same interval is also where care and repair happen. Clerks quietly triage queues, applicants or friends with connections do presence-work, they keep calling, sending WhatsApp messages, and re-submitting documents, and in so doing, they keep the file alive and actionable.

This is maintenance work; it keeps the apparatus minimally functional when budgets can’t. As Degani also notes, when official pay and operating budgets are too low, the pressure to rely on discretionary “top-ups” grows, which is part of why maintenance and extraction become hard to disentangle. Often, after enough patient follow-ups, nothing extra is paid—only time. I call this dark worth: value produced through delay, where extraction and maintenance are uncomfortably entwined.

Holding both truths at once is uncomfortable and necessary: the interval sustains both extraction and endurance.

How corruption and care meet in the same place

So where does that leave corruption? It isn’t a separate system, and it doesn’t sit outside the state. It happens inside the bureaucracy—at the heart of ordinary administrative procedures.

The unsigned line, the “in progress” status, the “not paid” flag keep a case open without a decision, like a pause button. Those small labels control time and sequence—who moves next, and when. In the same pause, a bribe can be asked; a clerk can also quietly help. The opacity that can hide extraction can also shelter the care and repair that keep things working at all.

This is governance by absence. Recognizing it gives us a more realistic map of where and how to confront corruption - without crushing the care that keeps systems from falling apart.

Literature

Degani, M. (2021) “Cutting without Cutting Connection: The Semiotics of Power Patrols in Urban Tanzania.” Signs and Society 9(2)

Degani, M. (2024) “Invention and Grace: Taking Turns in a Streetcorner Bureaucracy.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 14(1)

Jackson, S. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot

Hull, M. (2012) Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan

Hull, M. (2023) “The file: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy,” Language & Communication 23