We topped global measurement indicators in financial, political and administrative corruption, lack of transparency, and absence of freedoms! We are also the lowest ranked nation in the indicators of decline in education.

Very few of the competencies took up their jobs without parliamentary or governmental mediation. The selection of the approximately 500 higher-level employees is not often subject to aptitude tests, as is supposed, according to civil service laws.

And if it were applied, only a few would have passed it, and the best example is the tests conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last March, to select 30 candidates for diplomatic positions abroad, and it is said that the number of those who applied to fill them is close to a thousand, none of them succeeded in the test, or very few, which “forced” the ministry to make another announcement asking those willing to join the foreign service to send applications.

This is the tragedy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in finding 30 candidates, even half-qualified, out of a thousand applicants and this is considered the first warning bell of the collapse that befell the state.

When education declines, so does the level of graduates in the area of medicine, engineering, chemistry, pharmacy, and even religion, because these are the result of bad courses, bad teachers, and semi-official condoning the wave of forged diploma holders that has swept all ministries, the university and the rest of the educational institutions, and this is most dangerous situation.

It is painful for this to happen after more than a hundred years of formal education in the country, and the opening of the first school of its kind in the Arabian Peninsula!

A former ambassador, who was distinguished by his knowledge and personality, says that he suffered a lot from the low level of education of the new diplomats who had joined the service, in addition to their unwillingness or willingness to learn the work.

The majority of them got the job, through intermediaries, for its great financial advantages, and for the temptations of working abroad. He was shocked by the ignorance of some of them in the simplest political matters, such as distinguishing between the flag of his state and the flags of other Arab countries, or the full name of the head of state, and the names of some important ministers, not even the name of the foreign minister, nor knowing the difference between the Sultanate, the Emirate and the Republic, and which of them applies to his “state.”

He also discovered that some of them did not know the Sunnah, let alone even the date of Saddam’s invasion of his homeland, or the causes of the invasion, or where Russia is located, and is it an European or Asian nation… and a lot of other semi-intuitive general information, for those who will assume a high diplomatic position. He added that the self-respecting ambassador does not really want to work with these people, nor for them to be among the country’s representatives abroad.

A former Minister of Education made a comment on the great failure at the exams conducted by Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that he receives several calls from the applicants who failed and their parents complaining about the difficulty of the exams and manipulation of the results despite the fact that the exams are electronically conducted and the result is announced immediately.

 Sadly, parents of the applicants have issued a statement requesting Ministry of Foreign Affairs to overlook the results of the exams and hire their children. Apparently, they wanted to inform the world about the current level of education in Kuwait through their children!

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By Ahmad alsarraf