CBE: A Study in Institutional Masochism
Monday morning. The calm after the storm. Temperate, clear, almost pleasant, the kind of day that makes you want to believe the world is a gentle place. A lie, of course, but a comfortable one.
I walked into the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia with the last shreds of my dignity that meant nothing. The place was packed. Not the efficient, organized chaos of a train station heck even the train stations are fucking unorganized, this was the particular kind of crowding that comes from absolute entropy. People standing. Waiting. Sulking. Bored out of their skulls. Staring at nothing. The air was thick with the collective understanding that everyone here was going to lose at least an hour of their lives and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.
Behind the counter, a man in a necktie was clicking away at a keyboard with the gravitas of someone trying to disarm a nuclear warhead. Every keystroke was a deliberate, painful event. Tap. Pause. Tap. Pause. Tap. The man was not processing transactions. He was performing the idea of processing transactions. And the audience thirty-odd souls sweating in their Monday clothes had no choice but to watch.
At one point he started ripping pages out of a notebook. Slowly. Deliberately. Like this was a task. Like he was getting paid by the page. And maybe he was. Maybe somewhere in the CBE organizational chart there is a line item for “Page Ripping” and by God he was going to justify that budget allocation. I watched him for a solid three minutes. He ripped exactly two pages. I have seen glaciers move faster.
And here’s the thing that kept circling my brain like a vulture: none of this needed to happen.
Every single transaction being done in that room could be done on a phone. In Estonia, they haven’t set foot in a bank in fifteen years. In Sweden, cash is an endangered species. In Kenya, they move more money via M-Pesa in a single day than CBE processes in a month, and they do it from cheap smartphones in villages with no running water. You can open an account with a fingerprint. You can activate a card with an SMS. You do not need to stand in a room that smells vaguely of desperation and old paper while a man in a necktie rips pages out of a notebook like he’s defusing a bomb.
Redirecting data would have been so much easier than redirecting these crowds. But redirecting data requires competence. Requires systems thinking. Requires asking the question: Why does this have to be done in person? and then having the stones to do something about the answer.
But CBE doesn’t ask that question. CBE is not a bank. CBE is a jobs program disguised as a financial institution. It is a monument to the idea that suffering builds character. It is a breeding ground for incompetent assholes, and I don’t even know how the place got so popular. Might be a research topic “the anthropology of institutional masochism” but why bother understanding why shit is shit? It doesn’t change the fact that it’s shit.
Any other bank is better. Any of them. I don’t care if it’s a credit union in rural Montana run out of a trailer. I don’t care if it’s a digital-only app based in a jurisdiction nobody’s heard of. I don’t care if it’s a goddamn mattress with a PayPal account attached. Every single alternative to CBE has one thing CBE doesn’t: a reason to improve. Because outside the walls of this suffocating bureaucracy, banks compete. They fight for customers. They innovate or die.
CBE doesn’t compete. CBE doesn’t innovate. CBE just is, like a mountain, or a disease, or a bad smell that follows you down the street.
I should have eaten breakfast. I knew this was going to happen. I knew walking into a CBE branch on a Monday morning was the financial equivalent of self-flagellation. But I’m on a keto diet or something for what its fucking worth, it’s all for the benefit of my health, right? So I went in hungry and came out an hour and a half later with nothing accomplished just a jolly fellow with my dick in my hand.
One hour and thirty minutes. To do something that, in any functional country, would take ninety seconds on an app.
I finally escaped into the sunlight. The air outside was clean. The sky was blue. People were walking around like normal human beings. And I stood there on the curb, blinking, trying to remember what it felt like to believe that the world could work the way it’s supposed to.
I couldn’t remember. The CBE lobby has a way of erasing that part of your brain.
But I still had my notebook. Still had my pen.
So I wrote it down. Every last miserable detail. Because if you can’t fix the machine, at least you can describe exactly how it broke you. and maybe next time you will be ready for the fuck fest that awaits you down the CBE lobby.