We've probably all at some time come across bureaucracy. Just about every company and country has a degree of red tape designed, it would seem, to infuriate us. But which country is the worst offender? Our Dhaka correspondent, Frances Harrison, thinks Bangladesh would have a good chance of winning that dubious honour.

If anyone else tells me the bureaucracy here is all my fault because it's a legacy of British rule I will probably strangle them with red tape. Actually bureaucratic obstruction has been elevated to an art form in Bangladesh and is grandly called red tape-ism. But there's nothing lofty about the clerks who literally laugh at my despair after a morning spent running around in circles in government offices. A sadistic streak seems to be a pre-requisite for a job in the Home Ministry in particular.

Secretaries here will think nothing of keeping you waiting outside the wrong person's office for an hour. The trick is to find the concerned official. But even then you might contact him a few days later only to learn that his job description has mysteriously changed. He's no longer the concerned official and no he doesn't know who is. This is a place where they lose application forms, rarely have a working fax machine and generally won't let you in through the door without an appointment.

Nothing works. Shouting and stamping your feet is futile, as is maintaining saintly patience and poise. Sometimes the problem is the red tape has got so tangled up that nobody understands the system any more.

"First person to get paper work through"

Sent to three different ministries for permission to visit refugee camps, eventually I set a record becoming the first person ever to get the paper work through. It took many weeks and the intervention of the prime minister's office. At times one department tells me I don't need special permission to visit certain areas while another group of officials say I do. In desperation I have turned to friendly ministers for help, only to be told not to blame the government because it's the bureaucrats' fault and not the politicians. After a while you wonder who's in control and who was elected?

It seems to be everyone's ambition in Bangladesh to get behind a desk. It means taking it easy and lording it over everyone else. Even more so if you've got a government job which is supposed to be for life. The salary may be low but there are many opportunities for supplementing it. Corruption has become so institutionalised that some civil servants think there's nothing wrong with a little baksheesh for services rendered.

In most developing countries people have the intelligence not to ask foreign journalists for bribes but not so here. And at times it's almost tempting to pay your way out of the frustration. I once told a director of the prime minister's office about a special branch policeman outrightly demanding a bribe for a visa extension. Instead of showing any shock, he just laughed and said: "Tell me about it. These people are so stupid they even ask my father for bribes and he has to explain that I work for the prime minister and even then they don't get it."

Military intelligence - a super bureaucracy

But as one minister said: "Bureaucrats are one thing, army bureaucrats are another." This is a country which has been ruled by the army more often than not. Military intelligence - which most people here think is a contradiction in terms - is a super breed of bureaucracy. Even officials working closely with the prime minister say they have been followed by intelligence officers while travelling with her.

Undercover policemen can be spotted a mile off by their clothes - the grey safari suit and unusually fine shoes. It's almost a uniform. The other distinguishing feature seems to be extreme naivety. Many times the man who's supposed to be surreptitiously spying on me has actually asked to come in my car because he doesn't have his own transport. In one remote town the policeman tried running after our jeep on foot but couldn't keep up for long. His report on my activities must have drawn on his imagination quite heavily.

So what's the answer to this Kafka-esque nightmare, where you telephone an official repeatedly only to be told he's not at his desk - first he's eating, then he's praying, then in the bathroom for hours and finally either sleeping or in another meeting or possibly both at once? On one occasion my colleague called General Ershad, the former military ruler of Bangladesh, only to be told by the general himself that he wasn't at home. Knowing his weakness for women, I was made to call two minutes later only to find the general was suddenly himself again and at home.

It's almost as if there's a bureaucratic version of the white lie. Officials seem to have no shame in telling terrible untruths about their whereabouts and then admitting later on that it was a total fiction. The energy secretary twice promised interviews and cancelled at the last minute. His assistant said he'd rushed off to a parliamentary committee meeting on gas which nobody had every heard of. Later the secretary himself admitted he'd just got cold feet about the interview.