A sceptic mood

By Salama A. Salama

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When people start rebuffing the government as it tries to get something done, it makes you think. Is it that people in this country are against reform in general, or have they had it with the government and its tricks?

Recently, every time the government tries to introduce new policies it is immediately chastised. The public now acts on the assumption that anything the government says is crooked, anything it does is a gimmick, and that it is safe to react to new ideas with denunciations.

A recent proposal by the National Democratic Party (NDP), which was approved all too hastily by the government, has met such a fate. The government says that it wants to manage its commercial assets in a manner that would enlarge public participation. Instead of following the conventional path of privatisation, the government is trying something new. It is proposing to sell formerly state-owned companies directly to the public. The government will keep running the companies, but members of the public will be allowed to own stocks.

The government has been having trouble getting legislation ratified because of the suspicious mood of the public. Often, the government had to push laws through in overnight sessions of parliament. Sometimes parliament has been completely sidelined, with measures having the power of law passed as presidential decrees.

The government assumed that selling shares in its formerly state-owned firms would be popular. But once the debate got going, it transpired that senior economists and veteran politicians disliked the idea. Faced with an unusual initiative on the government's side, the public couldn't make sense of the move. The government was offering them stocks in companies for no apparent reason. And for the average citizen, the stocks the government was offering didn't mean much. If anything, their value was but a fraction of what an average family spends on private tuition, healthcare, housing or transportation.

As it happened, many people came to the conclusion that the beneficiaries of the move would be the country's rich and powerful -- those who can buy a large quantity of stocks when the time is right. But this is not why the public opposed the move. The reason they opposed the move is that they cannot trust the government. They cannot trust it because they saw it sell land to major investors for next to nothing. Then the latter, instead of reclaiming the land as promised, turned it into luxury complexes and made billions in profit.

Recently, a court ordered the government to stop selling natural gas to Israel. The court justified its ruling by saying that the government should have consulted parliament before disposing of the country's natural resources. It is true that the government signed the gas deal with Israel in secret, and with little regard to the rules of transparency or to constitutional procedures.

Because the government is guilty of such acts, ordinary citizens question its motivations. One cannot blame them. Nor can one blame those who are convinced that the government's plan to sell stocks in public companies is just a gimmick. And one cannot blame the intelligentsia that questions the government's policies when the NDP is refusing to discuss the country's future with anyone.

We may talk all we want about social harmony, but without political participation don't expect the public to believe a word of it. The investment minister may have had a good idea. But right now, the public isn't buying it.