O leadership, where is the Silk Road?

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WHENEVER there is a signal from an official regarding the development of Kuwait, we rejoice and cheer.

When the late Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad visited Beijing in 2018 to sign agreements and memoranda of understanding with Chinese officials within the framework of the Silk Road project, the development of the Kuwaiti islands, and the Northern Economic Zone, we believed it represented a strong new beginning.

Likewise, when Sheikh Nasser Sabah Al-Ahmad announced, at the Belt and Road Forum in 2017, the start of concluded partnerships with Chinese companies, we were hopeful.

However, all this remained ink on paper, because the cause is not essentially the ideas, but rather the encroachment of one authority over another, and the undermining of projects if those who use everything for their own interests do not benefit from them.

In this regard, I remember what the late Sheikh Saad Al-Abdullah said during a major conference about 40 years ago – “All of Kuwait will become a free trade zone.”

So what happened? Nearly two decades later, the free trade zone became merely a square in an industrial corner of Shuwaikh, mired in corruption because those who drafted its law were stakeholders, not national specialists!

On the day the late Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad announced the Silk Road project, we believed that tens of thousands of Chinese workers would come to Kuwait to work in their country’s companies, and that our country would become like Singapore, Malaysia, or even like China, of course with the difference in size and population.

But what happened was the opposite, because there were those who kept on deflating the wheels.

As for the Silk Road project, the poor implementation of paving roads that produced potholes with every rainfall caused it to become the “burlap road”. With the country being closed off with “padlock and key,” investors refrained from it. In fact, none of the talented and creative people would accept to visit it anymore.

Indeed, there is a global conviction that Kuwait does not want to develop.

In China, there are about 50,000 American and European companies, with hundreds of thousands of investors, who employ local workers, without requiring them to hold university degrees, and without requiring a woman to bring a certificate to prove she is not pregnant if she wants to visit the country.

All this is happening in Kuwait because there is an insistence on backwardness. That is why we saw that the project to transform Kuwait into a global financial and commercial center, for which the year 2035 was set, was prepared but the current government announced about delaying that plan to the year 2040. After a few years, it will be delayed to the year 2045, and perhaps it will be further delayed until the third millennium because Kuwait lives on slogans.

That is why we fear that the fate of the agreements that were concluded during the visit of His Highness the Crown Prince Sheikh Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah to China will be the same as any other because of the corrupt people, the partisan interests that control the National Assembly, and the ministers’ fear of taking action.

That is why we say explicitly: O leaders of Kuwait, the state needs a revolution of laws that will destroy all the wear and tear that caused our delay; laws that will put things right. This is your mission. Otherwise, Kuwait will continue to move against the time, as is our situation today.”

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

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