How to face challenges

There is no doubt that, as a state and people, we all have serious challenges including some security ones about our national security and existence as part of a highly tense region witnessing contradicting international interests, making it an arena for conflicts amongst major international capitalist countries seeking protection of their interests, political influence and sustainability. We also have very serious developmental challenges that go way beyond the economy to include political and social elements without which no sustainable development is achievable.

However, facing major challenges and overcoming them will not be achieved in the presence of the current futile political equation that monopolizes power and wealth, especially after public participation in decision-making has decreased with the result that success rates in parliamentary elections are becoming as low as half percent in some constituencies, at a time when, according to the constitution, an MP should represent the entire nation.

If the current political situations continue, efforts to face the coming major regional or developmental challenges will be very feeble, or rather nonexistent

In addition, social justice imbalances will get wider as a result of political imbalances included in the government’s economic document, repression and destroying the national fabric that made the government’s role retreat, and unfortunately, made way for former traditional social forms that used to prevail long before forming modern states.

Thus, people, namely the youth in universities and schools, started bragging of their origins instead of laws and state establishments. They brag about secondary identities, tribal, sectarian and family affiliations to whom they resort to get their constitutional rights. To make things worse, the role played by legislatives turned into a merely nominal one and rubberstamping whatever bills proposed by the government, as we have seen over the past three years.

Once more, if the current political situations continue without radical political and democratic reforms that would produce a developed political system instead of nominal establishments controlled by the government and abandoned with a blink of an eye, efforts to face the coming major regional or developmental challenges will be very feeble, or rather nonexistent. In addition, the government’s statements about facing challenges are totally different from its policies and decisions.