Hard to say without knowing the details, but I will admit that in many ways Microsoft Office is currently better than the free alternatives* for interacting with other businesses and governments.
It’s one thing for an individual to risk having a difficult time interacting with businesses/governments and dealing with some frustration. It’s another thing for a government to do that and risk being left behind by the others. Especially when that government is in a weakened state.
*One example I encountered today is selecting nested tables in a word/writer document. LibreOffice writer just won’t select the nested tables and in turn I’m going to spend many hours on a task that historically took minutes in word. This is worth it for me for this one thing but is only a single example of many that exist.