Firm leadership … waste of time shatters a renaissance in Kuwait

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FOR six decades, especially in the last 30 years, time had been against us because successive governments did not invest it properly.

Rather, it can be said that years were wasted in pursuit of mainly personal goals, the most prominent of which is the conflict between the governments and the successive parliaments that were founded on a single principle — blackmail for achieving goals that are completely far from the development and advancement of the country.

Since the unconstitutional dissolution of the National Assembly in 1986, we have seen nothing but weak governments. This is because the principle of selection was based on a major flaw — ancestry, tribal, family and partisan interests.

Therefore, many of the ministers were the product of what the Secretary-General of the Council of Ministers Abdullatif Al-Roudhan hid, and not aimed for the supreme national interest. With the exception of the ministers from the ruling family who are chosen according to a well-known mechanism, many of the ministers were not known for anything. They were just names to complete the ministerial lineup.

For this reason, governments often suffer from weakness. Most of them become a source of threat to governmental solidarity due to the late discovery of suspicions of corruption or character cases against some of them. This makes them exposed to blackmail to either agree to the demands of the MPs or end up in gallows of political execution through parliamentary grilling and vote of no confidence, thus becoming an excellent victim of poor choice.

In all countries of the world, the ministers, senior officials, leaders of the army and security services, undersecretaries and assistants are not chosen at random or according to deals, but based on their curricula vitae and the extensive background checks conducted by the relevant agencies that have files for every citizen.

The minister is the top decision-maker in his administration. He therefore should not be ignorant of the simplest rules of ministerial work.

This is unlike the neighboring countries such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where a member of the Shura Council is not selected based on the desire of a particular influential official, but according to a specific mechanism. There are about 4,000 candidates who are being vetted to end up with 150 qualified members. The same happens in the UAE and some Gulf countries. When it comes to selection of ministers, the selection process is long, and this warrants that none of the selected ones is under any suspicion.

On the contrary, in Kuwait, things have proceeded over the past decades on a pattern of random selection. This has been the reason for its further backwardness, because no one paid attention to time or worked on investing it for the benefit of future generations.

One of the clear examples of administrative backwardness is the recent decisions of the Council of Ministers regarding the railway project, the development of Failaka or the Silk City projects, and others.

Those decisions came very late even though some of them were put forward for about 30 years and others for 40 years. Therefore, it is worth asking — is it an attempt to exonerate itself or a desperate attempt to survive, or to raise the cost for the next government?

Our wasted time does not stop just at this point but it reaches all aspects of political life in the country. Even our foreign relations are not managed according to a policy that is in line with regional and international developments, but are standing in the past, which almost narrows us down to hope.

Therefore, there must be a political and administrative awakening through a firm leadership that makes the sword of time decisive in executive decisions, in order for Kuwait to come out of the circle of time wastage that made it the symbol of backwardness in the region.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

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