Our illustrious and illiterate leaders

An odd piece of paper is slipped under the door of Cell Block G, claiming to be some type of census from Dubai Municipality. Can it be trusted?

The form bears all the usual hallmarks of government documentation: boxes far too tiny to insert numbers or text in, irrelevant and intrusive questions, and person-categories ranging from "Head of Household" to "Servant" (which includes cooks, drivers, maids and so forth).

And best of all, an education-level category, which descends from "Post-Graduate" to the box that surely must be ticked by every municipality employee: "Illitrate".

But the key piece of evidence proving this document to be a genuine government initiative is in fact its very existence. In a country where every single expatriate is on some form of visa, where one cannot get a mobile phone, rent contract, car, bank account, utilities or internet account without providing multiple passport and visa copies (each and every time you apply or reapply), where every single person is effectively owned by a known and registered company or local sponsor, they still haven't got a fucking clue how many people are here, what they do, or where they're from.