Government of churning milk, good butter is what gets eaten

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BEING creative is to turn challenges into opportunities for the development of society without harming any of its segments. Therefore when a government succumbs to parliamentary pressure or to pressure from influential people, it loses the most important elements of its existence. This is because it becomes a tool in the hands of others, instead of being an executive authority responsible for the state and its people.

On this basis, most of the previous governments have been tasteless. Some of them were forgotten because they were unable to leave a distinguishing mark that people would remember. People’s ambition was to have a government that is able to break the restrictions that they inherited from their predecessors. However, that did not happen. This led the country to the current situation, especially in light of the presence of a government that has distanced itself from everything and has handed over its leadership to MPs who would never hesitate to grasp an opportunity and use it for their electoral interests.

The program of the current government is based on four axes that His Highness the Prime Minister considered as major challenges. They are – imbalance in the restructuring of the national economy and public finances, low productivity of the public sector and weakness of the human capital, low efficiency of the infrastructure, and environmental inconsistency.

In form, these axes seem wonderful, but in implementation, we did not witness any progress in any of them. Rather, it was closer to being an exact copy of the previous work programs that were lost in the conflicts between the National Assembly and the ministers. If there were right intentions, the government would have started from the right place, which is through a proposal to amend the laws that led to the weakness of the human capital – the engine of development creativity – when the previous governments made deals to pass laws that weakened the most important factor of development, which is the production of creative citizens who are capable of serving the country without relying on “wasta”.

The weakness of human capital is what led to the economic and financial imbalance, because narrowing the space for freedoms put the people between the hammer of silence over violations and the anvil of penalties for what is published.

We have seen what many people have gone through, while the media – printed, visual and audio – were chained with legal precautions, which led to this developmental deficit. We will not return to the pre-invasion governments, some of which excelled in development, as was the case with the governments of late Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad. It is the duty of every official to continue building and developing what his predecessors left behind, and to adhere to his slogans that he sees as work programs, which unfortunately is what the current Cabinet did not do.

It seems as though the Prime Minister relied on his honesty and integrity to operate. He was therefore afraid to take bold decisions, and even succumbed to parliamentary pressure, which paralyzed the country three years ago in a manner that was never seen before. The government never innovated, which perhaps is due to the limited capabilities of some ministers, as well as the extreme caution of its boss as if he was churning milk to obtain butter but he forgot that it is the good butter that gets eaten. This means that a prime minister with the same mentality in the future would be of no good to us.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

This news has been read 31295 times!