I wonder how the present ministerial team would be judged a few years down the road, but being an incorrigible optimist I would say that they would be judged positively. They should go down in the history of latter-day Phoenicia as having tried to start planting the idea in the public’s mind on the necessity of seriously beginning to contemplate attempting to pave the grounds for the emergence of a situation whereby the process of gently starting to apply the brakes on corruption would be facilitated.
Decision makers don’t like to be hurried. They have taken the right direction and the masses should be grateful to them for that.
By the turn of the millennium they should be proven right as the public administration will have probably purged itself of some of the vortices of corruption, but the road ahead would still be a long one. Things take time, you know, and good things are worth waiting for. Besides, the Lebanese think centuries ahead and their actions naturally take centuries to unfold; they owe the ‘long-term-planning’ gene to their Phoenician origins. Of course by that time the country’s name would have changed a dozen times more, and with luck the appellation ‘Lebanon’ would again be chosen for the stretch of land, so people living in that distant future will be able to say Lebanon is fighting corruption.
Come to think of it, why precipitate things and risk regretting this alacrity later? Generations in this millennium need to know more about the theory and practice of bad governance. Therein lies a weighty competitive advantage. Lebanon could establish an institute that teaches the art; better still a university with a research center that covers the region and also a publishing house and why not a hands-on lab facility. The country would attract students from all over the world and charge high tuition fees. The economic spillover effects of such a venture would be ample to say the least.
To be fair, Lebanon has yet to produce blue-ribbon experts in the subject and the book on bad governance was written elsewhere, but brilliant and innovative practitioners of the art abound in the country. With proper encouragement, motivation and incentives they should qualify to start publishing a “Bad Governance for Dummies” series.
