Your Highness … Social justice is to be keen on those in need, not the ones with potbellies

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WHEN the French Queen Marie Antoinette asked some of her servants why the French were demonstrating and they told her, “It is because they cannot afford the price of bread”, she replied, “Let them eat the cake”.

Your Highness the Prime Minister, we have advocates who are calling for an increase in the charges of services, gasoline, and electricity, and the cancellation of subsidies but without the existence of any solutions to ensure the budget of low-income families is not strained.

The millionaires and those with palaces do not feel the struggle of those living in apartments and small houses, or, as the Saudi Crown Prince said on one occasion: “The beneficiaries of the support (subsidy) are the owners of palaces, not the owners of the graves”.

This luxury in dealing with the challenges of society caused many problems in many countries. For example, it was the fuel of the French Revolution when the masses took that phrase as a slogan to eliminate the royal family.

It also represented the first steps in the decline of the state, i.e. a collapsing state, as Abdul Rahman bin Khaldun said in his famous Prolegomena.

People with low incomes do not have posh gardens where water is wasted while some areas suffer from scarcity of water. They do not have huge air-conditioning networks that consume large amounts of electricity and light that is sufficient for ten homes. They do not earn tens of thousands of dinars everyday. As the common people would say, “they barely make the end meet”, and have nothing but their fixed monthly salary.

Perhaps they do not know that many Kuwaiti families, especially those consisting of six and above members and whose income does not exceed KD 800 per month, knock on the doors of charity societies to seek help in managing their living expenses after the huge increase in the prices of goods and commodities.

According to some statistics, the poverty line in Kuwait is KD 800, and there are tens of thousands of citizens living with much less than that.

However, the state has not worked on solving this problem, because it relies in its opinion on the advice of the affluent millionaires, and not the economic and social experts. It also does not use the solutions that the Gulf Cooperation Council member states and the European countries have implemented to reduce the high rates of poverty.

Some Gulf countries have set segments for citizens who benefit from the subsidy, and raised the salaries of those with low incomes, as well as imposed taxes on those earning high incomes while providing great facilities at the same time.

Your Highness the Prime Minister, perhaps it is useful to refer to the biography of the most popular Brazilian President Lula de Silva, who inherited a heavy legacy when Brazil was suffering from extreme poverty and great corruption. His first words, when he took office as the President of the Republic, were, “Austerity is not for the poorest of all, but that the state dispenses with a lot of luxuries to support the poor”.

He then worked on increasing taxes on businessmen and the rich, and spent on 64 million Brazilians. In return, he provided businessmen with great facilities for investments, and gave them land for free and facilitated licenses.

In Kuwait, it is possible to implement this on projects and buildings that generate more than 20 percent of the profits for their owners. Part of these profits can be transferred as taxes, after which the salaries of employees earning low incomes can be raised, and the matter related to the beneficiaries of subsidies can be sorted.

On the other hand, if you adopt the slogan “Let them eat cake”, the government will end up increasing the number of poor people in the country who will be the fuel for any anger exploited by the owners of suspicious projects.

Those who claim to be keen about implementing social justice are the ones who benefit from any defects in it, while it is based on fairness to those with needs and not those with bruises.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

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