In Lebanon, problems have a very long half-life or shelf-life. Once it is created, the problem lasts for generations and never finds a solution.
On the evening local Lebanese newscasts, the news is always the same, day after day. Nothing gets ever decided within a reasonable time frame. Why? Because the Lebanese have no agency of their own. They can't or won't do what they're supposed to do. They wait for others (Americans, Syrians, French, Saudis, Israelis, etc... ) to tell them what to do or do it for them. Lebanon is a country but it is not a nation. And because it is not a nation, the state is impotent in the face of the multitude of problems that have accumulated for decades without a solution. Short-term fixes are often improvised in the aftermath of major wars or disasters.
As a state, Lebanon is a country of beggars. Instead of getting their act together, marshalling a bit of self-directed austerity, and rebuilding their country on their own (which takes time but keeps the country's dignity intact and maintains the autonomy of decision-making), the Lebanese have become addicted to mendacity. Getting free money from outside donors is like a drug, but now that the "dealers" (French, Americans, Saudis, Qataris, etc.) have finally put conditions before handing out their money to the Lebanese, the latter are going through painful withdrawal symptoms.
If he is smart - which doesn't seem to be the case so far - President Joseph Aoun should implement many "affordable" measures that do not need outside money to improve the daily lives of the Lebanese people. The average Lebanese is obviously concerned by the terrorist organization Hezbollah's insistence on keeping its illegal weapons, but this is an issue that is far beyond the reach of your average Lebanese citizen. There is not much that the ordinary Lebanese can do about it, other than hope that the government will somehow eventually address it. On the other hand, The average Lebanese is more concerned with being the victim of extortion, racketeering and other crimes perpetrated every day by the numerous Mafias operated by the political class: Water, electricity, roads, traffic, pollution, garbage, transportation, etc...
For those who may not know, there are two levels of government in Lebanon. One is the official government-state which is is appointed or designated by a tribal and religious assortment of groups that specialize in multiple ways of distorting democracy. They collectively refer to their distorted democracy as "consensual" democracy; I prefer to call it, "citizen sodomization democracy". The government-state makes grandiose laws but never implements them because it is too weak to enforce its own laws.
After an initial optimism buoyed by a thundering swearing-in speech by the former "strong" army commander Joseph Aoun, the Lebanese have now come to conclude that Mr. Aoun is just like his predecessor Michel Aoun: He sits in the "Chair" in the Baabda presidnetial palace, looks blessed, says the right things, but does nothing. Literally nothing on critical matters. He has lots of talks, discussions, and negotiations, he attends social events to give the impression that he is a modern president in touch with his people... but no results ever permeate to life on the ground.
The second level of government is the "black market" government. It is a grassroots movement of violent criminals and highway robbers who self-organize and syndicate at their own very local level in every town, district and province, and whose objective is to undermine the central government's ability to provide basic services with the specific intent of replacing the government with their own black-market services, generally with the approval and collusion of corrupt "citizen-sodomizing" government officials.
This applies to all life in Lebanon innearly every sector: water, electricity, education (private vs public), health, transportation, etc.
Let me explain with the example of the water problem. Lebanon is a huge mountain chain which benefits from very significant torrential rains and snow covers during the winter season. Lebanon could easily be selling water to countries around it, but corruption, laziness and incompetence take precedence. Water distribution should be a very easy task, given the small size of the country and the multitude of ravines, creeks, rivers, and streams that flow down from the mountain tops down to the Mediterranean.
Following the French mandate (1920s-1930s), which built the water distribution infrastructure during the golden years (1940s-1960s), native inborn corruption and incompetence, now freed from French oversight, took over: It gradually replaced the French administration's management and things went downhill from there. Then the Arabs launched their war against Lebanon (1970s-1980s) using the Palestinian guerillas as their local militia fighting the Lebanese army. But still, none of these factors are the main problem.
The main problem is that the Lebanese genome has a multiplicity of deleterious corruption Mafia-like genes in its DNA. The Mafias in power - political parties, religious orders, sectarian movements, etc. - do not want to relinquish the power they have over their own little herds. Instead of assisting the central government in properly administering its basic services, these "black market" local governnments deliberately sabotage and undermine the central government's capabilities, then convince their herds of the need to create parallel systems to compensate for the failures of the central government.
In the case of water, the government's grid exists. It is deteriorating for sure and is probably only 25% operational. In any average household that pays its exorbitant annual water bill of several hundred US dollars a year, government water reaches the household's water container about once or twice a week, delivering much less water than was paid for, in an unscheduled, unpredictable, haphazard paltry rivulet that lasts about 2 hours each time. The water reservoir-tank of the house slowly dwindles down as the days go by.
Many households have designed systems to convey rain water from the roofs to the house tank. This helps a bit and people get by during the abundant winter rains But beginning in May and through October, it never rains in Lebanon during a long and dry summer season. In good years, the snow caps on the mountaintops slowly melt during spring and summer and help alleviate the summer drought. There literally are thousands of springs and fountains that dot the landscape in every village and town acorss the country. But the derelict "citizen sodomization" system doesn't know how, or doesn't want to, organize itself and save this water for the summer.
The dereliction, as it were, is not just incompentence. It is a deliberate collusion between the local bosses (political parties chiefs, tribal and feudal leaders, religious leaders....) and the government officials in charge of water distribution. Here is how it works:
Even when there is plenty of snown on the mountaintops, the local bosses tell their colluding government water distribution officials to cut off or ration the water distribution to the households, thus creating a surge in demand by the households. The bosses then organize their own local Mafia criminal gangs into water delivery trucks that are filled in secret from special government outlets or from wells dug deep in the ground. Thirsty households have no choice but to call on those trucks to fill their water tanks at exorbitant cost (five times more expensive than government-provided water) and without any control over the quality of the water delivered.
The Mafia's water trucks deliver non-potable water for household usage. For drinking water, one has two options: Either hire yet another colluding water delivery company that delivers 20-liter jugs also at exorbitant cost, or drive to one of several springs around and fill your own containers. Spring water is generally good and healthy, as long as there are no houses built upstream with their cesspools marinating the underground water table. The higher the spring up the mountainsides, the safer its water is. But the water Mafia is also excellent in marketing: It propagates the rumors that spring water is all contaminated with sewage and garbage, and buying water from them is safer. The drinking water delivered in 20-Liter jugs often comes from tap water or well water that is then filtered. But you'll rarely see a report detailing the quality or the level of impurities or contaminants in the water.
Then imagine all the pollution generated by hundreds if not thousands of trucks and cars carrying water around every day, especially that trucks in Lebanon often run on filthy disgusting diesel oil or mazout and you can see them all over the place spewing their thick carcinogenic black smoke from their exhaust pipes.
Along the coastline, it's gotten so bad because so many wells have been dug up that seawater is seeping in and citizens in Beirut are increasingly reporting that the little bit of non-potable water they get from government taps is now salty across several areas of Beirut.
Bottom line: Citizens pay three water bills: 1- The government water bill which promises 100% but gives you 20%. 2- The bill from the Mafia water trucks for non-potable water. An average household of 4 people with a 40,000-liter tank have to have 20,000 liters delivered every week during the long five months of summer at the cost of $100 per truck, and 3- The bill from the potable water delivery outfits.
This is just the case of water. In education, private religious schools do their best to undermine, de-staff, de-fund public schools and give them a bad reputation among the "faithful" Lebanese people who trust the religious orders because of "faith". As a result, the public school and university system is impoverished and not as performing. The government is constantly pressured by the religious school Mafia to shunt funds aways from failing public schools and give them instead to the private religious schools who already make lots of money from exorbitant tuition and fees.
How do the Lebanese cope? Salaries are not sufficient (minimum salary is about $300 a month) and cannot cover the double or triple billing for every basic service. The answer is that every family in Lebanon has seen relatives fleeing the wars orchestrated by the political party bosses and settling in the far corners of the planet. These overseas expat relatives send money to their families who use that money to survive the blackmail and extortion by the colluding government and its local Mafias. In other words, the expatriate Lebanese - in the Arabian Gulf region, Europe, Australia, Africa and the Americas - are funding the entire system of corruption and theft in Lebanon.
In transportation, thousands of filthy, disgusting, dirty, private vans and taxis roam the country on diesel fuel, polluting roads and the environment. They stop anywhere they want to pick up passengers, and they also drive slowly to "harvest" riders, thus obstructing traffic on Lebanon's tiny one-lane roads. There are no bus stations like in civilized countries, so you hail a bus like you hail a taxi. Most bus riders are from the ranks of the poorest countries on earth: an army of some three hundred thousand foreign workers, maids, garbage collectors, and menial job occupiers. The Lebanese themselves are an arrogant bunch with a predilection for ostentation and show off and would rather be seen dead than riding a bus. The Lebanese, again on money fro their expat relatives, buy up on credit the fanciest cars there are: large gas-guzzling SUVs that are not suitable for the miniature roads of the country. They also drive like dangerous maniacs as there is no traffic code (or there is but no one abides by it) and the roads are rarely marked with street names, traffic signs or lanes (except in snotty rich towns or where foreign embassy staff live). A couple of years ago, the government tried to revive its own public transportation buses thanks to a gift of some one hundred new buses from France: The private transportation Mafia sent an army of its goons who vandalized and destroyed the new buses. The government gave up.
In the sector of electricity, the same dual or triple billing goes on: One bill to the government's electric company which charges huge fees but delivers only two hours of power a day, another bill goes to the local "Generator Mafia" which provides power at triple the megawatt unit price. There are no schedules for people to organize their lives around. Generators and Government power go on and off at haphazard times. In some instances, the government power shuts down on a tip from the generator mafiosi during holidays and during peak hours, with the result of fattening the generators' bill.
Back to Buddha-Joe sitting in Baabda. Non-violence is fine. Blessed-in-heaven looks and smiles are great. But as a former Army commander, Joseph Aoun should be doing more than endlessly negotiating with Hezbollah over the latter's surrender of its weapons. Aoun should be doing things that affect the Lebanese in their daily lives. He should address all the basic services criminality that has been endemic in the country since 1975. If the Lebanese start seeing their roads clean, the dangerous maniac drive thugs arrested and fined, their water supply more reliable, the government electricity altogether eliminating the generator mafias.... then perhaps there will be hope.
But for now, Joe Aoun, now in his ninth month on the job appears to be a clone of his predecessors: A do-nothing president afraid of upsetting the warlords, the bosses, and the Mafia criminals and biding his time until his term ends without a major crisis, which is a hopeless goal. The country has been saltating from one crisis to another for nearly 50 years without a single crisis ever meeting a definitive solution. Like his predecessors, Joseph Aoun's do-nothing administration will come up with short term band-aid fixes.
Finally, to his credit, Joseph Aoun has two American guns pointing at each side of his head: On one side, the gun that tells him he has to wage a civil war with Hezbollah, otherwise no foreign aid is forthcoming to rebuild the country, and on the other side another American gun that tells him if he doesn't wage a civil war to disarm Hezbollah, then America's Jewish militia south of the border will be happy to complete the job but with the cost of stealing the land south of the Litani River.
I do not blame him for his paralysis. It's a tough nut to crack. But if he doesn't want either scenarios - and there are no others - he should resign and let things take their course. A country that has been unable to govern itself for more than 50 years should not be allowed to persist: Euthanasia is preferable. It's the humane thing to do.
