Gordian knots binding us to failure
There are too many unresolved problems and maladies to count behind the tragedy at Tempe, chief among which is the inadequacy and improbity of the political system. The Hellenic Railways Organization (OSE) evolved into a massive black hole of waste and mismanagement under the stewardship of the politicians and political parties who governed the country over the course of many years, who appointed their cronies without compunction, spent as if there was no tomorrow and who knows what else. OSE is one of the many reasons, in fact, why Greece went bankrupt. Then the troika of international creditors came along and decided that Greek politicians were not interested in really modernizing the company so they imposed cuts on staff and salaries. We went from one extreme to the other. And then came Brussels, which decided to break up the Greek rail service into different pieces, so a system that was already broken became even more complicated with overlapping jurisdictions. Privatization was not what was hoped for because the company that decided to invest in the rail management company, TrainOSE, treated Greece like an underdeveloped country at a fire sale. It inundated us with press releases about the high-speed Silver Arrow, which never reached the advertised speeds (maybe that was for the best) and basically operated below professional standards.
But like every such debacle in Greece, this too has all the hallmarks of corruption and opportunism. Tenders are canceled or put on ice, joint ventures are deliberately dissolved and, at the end of the day, no one knows where the Greek people’s money is going. There is also, of course, the matter of the country’s inadequate justice system, which means that contracts and disputes can take years to be cleared by the courts. No amount of planning matters if you need to wait for ages for a decision from the Council of State or the Auditing Council.
A closer look at this incident also shows all the other classic symptoms of the ailing Greek state: an absence of meritocracy and performance reviews, unionists that are quick to assign blame but stand in the way of efforts to instill standards, a few favors here and there, and the appointment of the wrong people for important jobs. It even has the systematic theft of cables and sections of railway tracks that goes unpunished. It’s all there.
The big question is where do we go from here? How can we untangle these knots that keep the country back in so many areas? How do we ensure that some part of the Greek state doesn’t collapse when we need it most or doesn’t allow such a tragedy to happen again? The truth is that right now we are naked and unprotected, and not just in terms of our trains. Neither the reconstruction of the state, nor the troika, nor a goals-oriented government has managed to sever these Gordian knots that bind us… and sometimes kill.
