What have Kuwaitis benefited from the grilling?

Lawmakers who filed an interpellation against former Minister of Information and Minister of State for Youth Affairs Sheikh Salman Al-Humoud Al-Sabah, managed to force his resignation, make the government yield and designate his job to other ministers. But the question is: What has the grilling motion achieved? How have citizens benefited from it? Did the social media campaign accompanying the motion really reflect public comprehension of the meaning of constitutional inquiries, or was the entire issue only derived by retaliation and gloating wishes? Is that worthy of Kuwait’s democracy that is supposed to regionally leading?

The above questions, especially those relating to citizens’ benefiting from the motion, formed the core of debates in various Kuwaiti Diwaniyas. If the goal of this motion was to prove lawmakers’ competence in using constitutional inquiries, the cost was significantly greater. Using up both the government and the parliament’s time has delayed many projects and prolonged a review of financial and economic measures that ought to take precedence at this stage. The grilling motion also resulted in MPs threatening to file further ones. This would mean shelving legislation and consuming the parliament’s time, a process whose only benefit would be allowing MPs to show off their power. None of these measures benefit citizens. Excluding the minister from the cabinet neither solved the sport suspension crisis nor any other, making us inquire if we voted for lawmakers to only bring motions aimed at avenging the government, or to legislate and rectify governmental and parliamentary practices.

Once more, Kuwaitis prove that they never learn from previous mistakes and that their concept of democracy is limited to winning political points, rather than developing a parliament that achieves a state of inter-power cooperation. This experience proves that MPs are not serving all citizens, instead seeking personal gain through illegal transactions used to blackmail ministers and, thus, spreading corruption.

In previous decades, we learned not to hold MPs accountable and to turn blind eyes to their fatal flaws. We are used to measuring a lawmaker’s strength by the number of grilling motions he files against the government. Nobody ever discusses the laws he proposes and whether they would benefit citizens. We have been celebrating the ousting of a minister by these means without asking: What is next? The problem in question has not been solved. The reason we have so many unsolved problems accumulating: Lack of true public monitoring.