| THE INDEPENDENT Our new weekly gazette |
Your Excellencies, Welcome to your new posts and may God bless your efforts to assist the citizens of this country during the thirty weeks that separate us from the next parliamentary elections. We know how hard the task that awaits you is. We are also aware of the large expectations placed by the citizens in a government of national unity. Somehow we hope that you will not fall short of them. We fully realize that thirty weeks is too brief a period to expect it to lead to some comprehensive and far reaching reforms. However the conditions in that country have become so bad that we cannot but cling to the hope that each one of you will strive to do all that is in his/her power to make things better for us. To help you along in that mission we have decided to put to each Minister one question every week. We hope that you will find the time to examine that question with your assistants and provide us with the appropriate answer. Should we receive your reply, we shall not fail to publish it, and we shall ask our readers to evaluate and score it to determine to what degree it has satisfied them. Please do not mind us if some of our questions appear too direct or too blunt. Honesty and directness should always be the rule between friends and we know that you rightly see yourselves as friends of the people of this country. We look forward to keep the dialogue between us alive until the last day before election time hoping that when we go to the urns it will be with a renewed sense of confidence in our leaders and in the future of this beloved country of ours. • Question number one to his Excellency the Minister of Environment, Mr. Tony Karam “WHAT HAVE WE DONE SO FAR TO DEAL WITH THE SAIDA WASTE MOUNTAIN?” On the 21rst of March 2008 we read the following news on the internet about the “Saida waste mountain”: 21 Mar 2008 08:31:51 GMT Source: IRIN “ Established in 1975 as a temporary municipal tip, the rubbish mountain has grown over three decades of civil war, invasion and government neglect to become an open air dump for hundreds of thousands of tons of refuse from homes, factories, hospitals and slaughter houses, as well as debris from buildings destroyed in the 1982 Israeli invasion. The mountain has repeatedly caught fire and at least three times partially collapsed into the sea, prompting complaints from Cyprus, Syria and Turkey after currents swept rubbish onto their beaches. A collapse last month, following strong winds and an earthquake, sent about 150 tons of rubbish into the sea, snaring fishing lines and choking sea turtles which, environmentalists say, mistake the white plastic bags for jellyfish, their favorite food. “ Our question, Your Excellency, is about what has been done since the date that article appeared (nearly seven months ago). Has anything been done at all, and in the negative, how exactly does your Ministry plan to resolve that old lingering problem and according to which timetable? • Question number two to his Excellency, the Minister of Energy and Hydraulic Resources, Mr. Alain Tabourian: “WHEN WILL THE AUDITORS PRESENT THEIR POST-2001 REPORT ON EDL’s ACCOUNTS?” In the 2006 Paris III Resolutions presented at the Donors’ Conference the Government promised to have the accounts of the Electricite du Liban audited by some international auditors. Two years later the citizens of this country have only been granted the privilege to peek at the Auditors Report for the year 2001. For the few initiates who can understand this report the information that it provides has proven invaluable. However, our question is about when we can expect to see the audited reports for the years 2002 to 2007? Also what does the government envisage doing regarding the poor control over the receipt, the storage and the consumption of the mazout and the fuel oil at the power plants that the 2001 audit report was so critical about? Considering that the losses of EDL are expected to exceed $2 billion US dollars in 2008 (most of these losses being the result of spiraling energy costs) our question is fully justified, is it not? • Question number three to his Excellency, the Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Elias Skaff : “WHEN SHALL WE FINALLY HAVE A SINGLE NATIONAL AGRICULTURAL PLAN INSTEAD OF SEVERAL SEPARATE INITIATIVES?” Your Excellency, We heard you today with respect and with enthusiasm during the conference organized in honor of the FAO at the Order of Engineers when you stressed the importance of agriculture in our country’s economy and deplored the lack of support received by your Ministry in that domain. Your statement has encouraged us to ask you the following question: “Considering the fact that any sustainable and effective reform usually starts with the inception of a single, comprehensive and detailed national plan, we would like to know why, in the agricultural sector, we do not have such a document but rather a multitude of separate initiatives that are seldom fully implemented. I would like to cite some of these plans and/or strategies. May I be excused if I have omitted some that have escaped my knowledge? • The “Lebanon’ five year development plan” (Agriculture projects) that was published by the CDR on the 18/2/2000. • The “Strategie du development Agricole du Liban” that was published by the FAO in January 2004. • The National Agricultural Plan published by the Ministry of Agriculture in February 2006. • The Plan Vert published jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture and the CDR • The Paris III recommendations published before the Donors’ meeting in February 2006. When are we going to combine all these initiatives into a single “National Agricultural Plan” that will include projects with clearly specified and scheduled objectives? In that way the projects can be followed up monthly by the Ministry and their implementation can be concurrently monitored by Civil Society. • Question number four to his Excellency, the Minister of Telecommunications, Mr. Gebran Bassil: “WHEN SHALL WE FINALLY GET TO KNOW PRECISELY HOW MUCH WE MAKE OUT OF THE MOBILE SECTOR AS OPPOSED TO THE FIXED SECTOR AND THE OTHER FUNCTIONS OF THE MINISTRY?” The privatization of the mobile sector of the Telecommunications Ministry has been the subject of many discussions and as many hot controversies among the different political parties, the people’s representatives, and the citizens of all political affiliations, including the ones who have adopted a neutral position in that regard. Though no one contests the need for an urgent reform of the sector, few have cared to weigh up the financial pros and cons of the privatization alternative. To undertake such a “feasibility study” one would require some elemental information that is not presently available in the reports published monthly, quarterly or annually by the Ministry of Finance. The information that we need concerns the operating expenses and the revenue of the three main sectors of the Ministry: the fixed sector, the mobile sector and the sector covering all the other activities of the Ministry. Once that information becomes publicly available, most qualified financial experts will be able to evaluate, with a reasonable margin of accuracy, the optimum price for the sale of the two existing mobile stations and the third one that is contemplated. Such transparency will not only enhance the image of the State in the eyes of the citizens, it will serve to end, once and for all, the controversy over a subject that we all have very much at heart because it involves selling off an asset that is currently the source of 20% of the entire State revenue. |
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