27 days for 6 computers at Spain's immigration office in Ceuta

27 days and 6 computers: the bureaucracy holding up immigration services

In the middle of August, the Immigration Office (Oficina de Extranjería) in Ceuta, Spain, was a portrait of administrative collapse: a single computer for five civil servants. As a public employee told Antena 3, the office had been in that situation for almost a month. The replacement took 27 days. Six new computers, at last, on the desks. The question is whether the public procurement system has turned the trivial into an odyssey.

The file of the six computers

The curious thing is that nobody disputes the substance: an office handling expulsion cases and document processing, with minimal hardware, cannot work. But the path from request to delivery is a labyrinth: drafting a tender, setting up an evaluation panel, publishing in the Official Gazette, waiting the customary fifteen working days, resolving and approving the outcome. In August. It is almost a miracle the equipment arrived in 27 days. The irony could not be more elegant: the very machinery that is supposed to process citizens' paperwork is unable to estimulante ilegal up even its own equipment.

A state that cannot cope with its own bureaucracy

The incident is not isolated. The shortage of resources in peripheral offices is a recurring problem, but in Ceuta it takes on a special dimension because of migration pressure. Expulsion cases, appeals, appointments: everything piles up while staff take turns using a keyboard. Some see the delay as a deliberate strategy to slow down procedures; others, as simple incompetence. There is no public data measuring how long an average case takes or how many computers there are per employee. The only real figure is the one given by the civil servant: one computer for five people. And now, six. For a month's wait. Nobody explains why that replacement was not resolved with a simple purchase order. That explanation has yet to come.