Bureaucractic & boisterous!

I was ready to blow up, yesterday evening, after yet another troublesome run-in with the wonders of Burkinabe bureaucracy - ever wonder why the last bit of that word spells -CRAZY??
Well, down here, the little "desk-popes" (wonderful, direct translation from Danish, that one) who makes it to a "proper" job at a public administration office or - even worse - a lawyers or a notaires office really excel in waisting the time of everyone else.
For about 4 months now, I have been trying to open up a local company down here, and it just takes for fxxxxin EVER to get through to these thick-headed officials. They seem to enjoy it, when some completly non-important document can be discarded, because it "only" arrived in 5 and not the proper 6 copies. You have no idea as to the amount of legal mumbo-jumbo dating back to the old colonial systems of France and the UK one has to put up with down here. Everything is red tape - and plenty of it. Yesterday, I had to give in my penal records. These had of course been aquired from the Danish police (no, I still hold a clean bill, thank you!), but when they got that, they suddenly changed their minds. Now they wanted one from the BURKINABE Police - even though I do not live in Burkina, nor am I registered with them, of course. Simply plain ridiculous.

In fact, this is a big part of the problems in Africa. They REALLY need some legal reforms here. No-one bothers to open up a company in a proper way before doing business, because it simply takes too long and costs an arm and a leg. Example: To open a company, one of the docs needed is a contract of hire for the place you want to do your business. This contract has to come in 6 signed, originals (for God's sake no copies), and these then has to be "legalised" - meaning they have to have a stamp costing about 1 usd sticked on to EACH PAGE of the 6 docs... Then you have to register the contract of hire - which costs you a "fee" of 10% of the annual rent!!!!! I'm telling you - it is simply madness!