It is a slippery slope.
I once had a chat with an Abuja controller about his weather reporting.
I was flying Cessnas for Julius Berger so that I was often operating there. One day during the harmattan season we showed up and got a weather report of visibility just below minimums for the ILS. The only problem with that was that we had about three miles flight visibility in moderate dust haze. We could see the whole airport from overhead so what was this 700 metres or whatever it was?
Somehow or other we got the weather report we needed and made a normal landing. Then I got the driver to run me over to the tower. This was before the new terminal had been built so that they were still using that temporary tower.
The controller insisted that the visibility was 'not clear.' I pointed to the big yellow bulldozers at work up by the threshold of 22, saying that they certainly were visible and that was something like three kilometres away, was it not?
'Ah, but they are not distinct!' was his answer. I could only reply that they were 'prominent unlighted objects,' all he needed to establish the visibility even if it was a bit hazy.
After a bit of back-and-forth it came out that his concern was that if he cleared me to land giving the visibility as at minimums then a crash would be his problem. If he gave the visibility as just below minimums and cleared me to land at my discretion then it would not be his problem.
I could only reply that I had no need of help like this! To have good visibility reported as bad so that I was officially going to be busting minimums; that's just crazy.
If some Minister makes policy without thinking this over you will see the controllers naturally unwilling to do anything but keep flights on the ground in anything but CAVOK! What, they should blame the controller for not second-guessing the Captain?
I remember another time in Port Harcourt where the Tower Controller explained that he didn't want to issue clearance to land until he saw that my aircraft was 'properly positioned.' I pointed out that when the weather was down to minimums he wouldn't be able to see an aircraft on short final anyway, given the distance from the tower to there. Again, it seemed to be a well-meant way to add an extra layer of safety that just hadn't been thought through.