In Which I am Irritated by Tanzanian Security Theater

This has been bugging me for a while.  Below is a typical Tanzanian lock.  It can be defeated with a flat head screwdriver.

My house has a burglar-proof door.  I broke into it the first night at site, after locking myself out*, with a friendly neighbor who had a screwdriver and a claw-headed hammer.  While one could argue that it took long enough and made enough noise to be an easily defeatable break in, it is not burglar-proof.  Which is not to say that it is bad, since it ensures that I will be victimized by a better quality of more persistent criminal (what more can one ask?) but let's never forget that security is an unsolvable problem and approach it with intelligence and realism.  The best way to keep my house unbreached is to be friends with my neighbors.  

My current annoyances with security are caused by the Tanzanian Ministry of Education, which has actually been the cause of the majority of my annoyances, and typically centering around the national exams.  This is no exception.  Classes at the college are over, the students and most of the teachers have peaced out. The government has moved in to grade more national exams, this time using labor imported from outside the college (couldn't they have done that the last round of grading, rather than interrupt their future teachers' already far too brief training?).  All well and good, except they seem to think I am on retainer to help them troubleshoot their personal laptops.  I agree to giving their personal laptops wireless access.  Period.  I am working on making it clear that I only do this during normal working hours.  The reason this is security related is that the ministry workers are camping in the ICT office building and they have decided that their grading work is so super-sensitive that non-government personnel must be escorted at all times in this building.  This means that when I get text messages asking me to show up and distribute wireless access like the benevolent internet-dispensing deity that I so clearly am, I have to wait around for someone to escort me into the building I have the keys to, let me into the server room (that I also have the keys for) where there are all the servers and routers that I have the admin passwords for, and then they hand me their personal laptops, tell me their passwords for their personal laptops, and then have someone escort me out.

And have I mentioned there is wireless?  And I have admin and personal laptop passwords?  I don't even need to be physically in the building if I decide to be a security problem.  Really government people, the way to keep your sys admin staff (which is pretty much me**) from becoming a security risk is to be good friends with them and not infuriate them with demands for unpaid 24/7 tech support and submitting to pointless security theater.

*It was not my fault.  I had my keys with me.  One of the multiple latches on the inside of the door somehow latched itself while I was outside because it was really loose and I kinda have to slam this door to get it to shut.

**I have taught the ICT teacher who is there to turn the servers on for them how to give wireless access in the hopes that I wouldn't have to do this, but unfortunately, he doesn't have a computer, and the government people's computers pretty much uniformly don't have java installed, which is required to run the nice graphical interface for the router, and I really don't want to mess with the government people's virus-riddled Windows Vista boxes more than I have to.