Read what the press wants and what you want from it

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TODAY His Highness the Prime Minister Sheikh Dr. Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah will receive the editors-in–chief of local newspapers. This is a meeting that the Kuwaiti press media has been optimistically looking forward to, just as it has become accustomed to in the past decades.

However, the last meeting was with His Highness the Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Khaled when he was appointed as the Prime Minister in his first government. At that time, he had promised the opinion-makers that the meeting would be a monthly event but he was preoccupied with altercations with the National Assembly, and the resulting dissolution of the Council of Ministers and the resignation of ministers undermined this promise.

Over the past six decades, the press has placed before the executive decision-maker the concerns and issues of citizens especially in recent years. This is either regarding stimulating the economic cycle, increasing the national product, improving the citizens’ standard of living, resolving the Bedoun issue, and dealing with the evils that resulted from the collapse of the education sector, the flood of forged certificates, and other issues that must be resolved quickly.

However, there was no one to listen or discuss because the ministers were either working to protect themselves from the MPs’ attacks on them by concluding deals with them “under the table,” and also submitting to them on issues that are merely secondary, such as preventing co-education, which is something that contradicts the simplest rules of logic, or the so-called negative phenomena authority, or job appointments that violate the law.

All this was recorded by the press, and highlighted in order to draw attention to what is happening in the country, but “your ministerial organs were all mute.”

In fact, the ministers’ submission to the parliamentarians reached the extent where they handed them the needle and the thread for them to tailor matters as they wish.

His Highness the Amir, in his first supreme speech before the current National Assembly, was clear in this regard when he explained in detail how the agreement between the two authorities led to pushing the country into abysses that no one could wish for, because the sword of parliamentary accountability was drawn against the ministers who feared for their positions and privileges.

Therefore, in recent years, we have seen prime ministers, ministers, and senior officials being taken to court for tampering with public funds, appointments, and other clearly visible violations. When the press was publishing these corruptions, it was prosecuted for allegedly publishing false, or rather fake news.

For this reason, it placed before it an arsenal of suppression of free voices with four laws, all of which serve to prevent the disclosure of what is going on in terms of the parliamentary corruption.

Social media also had its largest share of silence. Dozens of citizens were taken to prison, while others fled abroad.

By the way, this is the first time that Kuwait has experienced so many barriers preventing the truth from being revealed.

All of this led to adapting the Kuwaiti reality according to retarded visions, as if we were in a “Taliban” state. It also led to the closure of the country, making it repulsive to investment, fighting individual initiative, and stealing public money through projects that experience has proven were more for the people than for infrastructure development.

It is well established that freedom of press ensures that decision-makers make sound decisions. It is also a basic necessity for enhancing transparency and accountability in all areas of society.

However, when it is governed by imbalanced considerations based on an iron curtain to prevent seeing the illegal practices of ministers and parliamentarians, then corruption becomes widespread, and institutions become farms for corrupt officials, which means increasing the injustice of the common people.

Today, people believe that they are facing a different Prime Minister. Perhaps he realizes that the press is his primary helper, and is his weapon with which he fights corruption, and just as he can, with transparency, putting things right, so that no authority transgresses the other.

Therefore, he must work to liberate the press from the poisonous daggers that attack it through the four aforementioned laws in order to restore its strength, because it is the voice of the people.

It is good for His Highness the Prime Minister Sheikh Dr. Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem to reactivate the habit of meeting with the editors-in-chief, and for the meeting to happen on a monthly basis, or at close intervals, and for it to be open without caveats in order for what is said in secret to be said in openly.

In this regard, Kuwait needs to rejuvenate itself, which can only be achieved through freedom of press and media as a whole.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

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