Skewering Afghan Officials by Holding Up a Mirror

Jerome Starkey

The nepotism, payoffs and sheer incompetence that are commonplace in the Afghan government are the basis for a new TV show.

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the decrepit buildings that house Afghanistan’s ministries, one office is always new: the minister’s. It is also often where corrupt deals are done, incompetence often reigns and favoritism is the primary currency.

It is just such a room that provides the setting for a new television show, “The Ministry,” that sends up the nepotism, payoffs and sheer incompetence that are commonplace in the Afghan government.

The Ministry of Waste in the imaginary country of Hechland, which means “nothing land,” is inhabited by a weak minister and his hapless entourage.

The show premieres on Tolo Television, the nation’s largest network, on Thursday. It is, according to the producers, a new kind of show for Afghanistan: a “mockumentary.” It aims to make Afghans smile, not just because it is funny but because it is familiar, holding up a mirror to their lives but with just enough artistic distance to make them laugh.

“I have been working in the Afghan government for 42 years, so I have faced many problems,” said Ghulam Yahya Monis, who plays the role of the ministry’s administrative officer, and who like many of the actors holds several jobs to earn enough money. Most recently, he worked in marketing for a onetime government-owned bakery.

“The roles we are playing are very close to the experiences of people,” he said.

While frequently compared to the British hit “The Office,” the show has more in common with political satire — more “Monty Python meets Afghanistan.” The characters are people most Afghans can easily recognize: the “react first, think later” minister of waste collection and his fawning and not terribly bright brother-in-law who works as the ministry’s administrative officer; his pretty young secretary; the butler who serves tea; the minister’s ambitious top adviser and his self-aggrandizing and not very efficient bodyguard.

In the final scenes of an episode being shot earlier this week, armed men burst into the minister’s office and seem about to kill him. However, it emerges that the gunmen are angry not at the minister but at his bodyguard, who is their cousin. He has climbed the ladder to a profitable livelihood while leaving them behind. So, naturally, they are out for revenge.

The minister decides he has to fire the bodyguard to get the angry cousins to back off. But then he finds that the bodyguard’s brothers have a lock on providing security for all of Hechland’s ministries, so even if this bodyguard is fired the minister will soon find himself facing the same predicament. There is no way out.

Nepotism is a major theme in “The Ministry,” one that is well understood by every Afghan. Family, almost always, trumps merit.

People grumble about it, but they rarely feel they can question it publicly because hiring a family member is a form of loyalty, which is respected, and no one would want to be shunned by their own family because they were not up to the mark. And yet as the country modernizes, it is becoming increasingly clear that it can no longer afford such inefficiencies.

Corruption and scams are also regular topics in the show, which tries to make its episodes topical. Raising them with humor is part of the show’s not-so-covert political agenda, which is to encourage Afghans to question the way their government works and to point out the Alice-in-Wonderland rationales that drive Afghan officialdom.

“The actor is the camera of society, watching the society with a different lens,” said Abdul Qadir Farouk, 65, a longtime actor who plays the minister. “It is to make people smile, but also to give people political knowledge.”

Television has an especially important role to play in Afghanistan because so few people read, Mr। Farouk said. “We need cinema and theater to teach them,” he said.
.nytimes.com