Beirut 2020 by Charif Majdalani

Author:Charif Majdalani [Majdalani, Charif]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

In thirty years, the entire country became the private hunting ground of the caste of oligarchs in power, which established a relationship with the citizenry similar to a mafia’s, offering protection, guarantees, and small opportunities to all those who asked for them, and preventing any form of access to government officials except petitioning. This oligarchy created excessive factionalism in the state sector by confiscating all public services and their administrative apparatus, putting a stranglehold on all ministries, municipalities, and other public entities, then dividing up areas of responsibility along religious lines. All this resulted in, among other aberrations, the padding of the bureaucracy with tens of thousands of newly created fictitious jobs, which put a considerable strain on the public purse. To say nothing of the fact that entire pointless organizations continued to exist, and to be provided with directors and secretaries and orderlies to this day. The administration service for the railroads, for example, is still operating, although there has not been a single rail or a single train anywhere in the landscape for sixty years. A mysterious “office of the flag,” no doubt intended to ensure that all representations of the national flag accord with the rules set out in the constitution, costs millions. And salaries are still being paid to public servants who have been dead for eons, along with lifelong indemnities to the descendants of all members of Parliament, unto the nth generation. It’s all very banana republic, and it would almost be funny, Kafkaesque, or absurd, if it weren’t coupled with the total indifference and arrogance of the oligarchy in power, which naturally never manages to agree on the government budget—not out of concern for the accuracy of the accounts, but because the shares of the cake are not considered equitable by one or another of its members.

This arrogance reached its apogee on January 22, 2019, during the Davos Forum, when a Lebanese minister, who was also the son-in-law of President Aoun, proudly declared that Lebanon could give lessons to the rest of the world on how to run a country, and could teach the great nations, such as Great Britain and the United States, how to govern without a budget.

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