THE following was stated by Abdul Latif Thunayan Al-Ghanim, and extracted from the records of the Constituent Assembly, when he was presiding over it, more than 60 years ago.

He was quoted as saying, “A large number of members is very necessary for Kuwait because our situation is still tribal”.

The clan world only elects the members of the clan, regardless of their competency, and no matter how competent the competing candidate is or how the nation will benefit from his winning the election.

By increasing the number of members of the Council, we will have doubled the possibility of increasing the number of people with good competencies, and we will have given them a greater opportunity to win membership of the Council and take part in its work.”

Al-Ghanim had a vision of the future, as did some others, but he had the courage to speak out. He saw the democratic flaw from the first day and it was very possible to overcome the tribal and sectarian situation by assembling the components of society.

If the successive governments had continued their wise policies regarding integration, and orientation towards loyalty to the homeland and not to race, tribe, sect or family at some point they had the tools, and the homeland sought to use them for a while and then abandoned them, knowingly or unknowingly, otherwise we would have not been in the situation we are in today.

With the beginning of independence, and within the policies of participation of all citizens in enjoying the wealth of the state, lands and ready-made houses were distributed, often by lot, to the citizens.

This was the beginning of the integration of the various groups of society within the neighborhood or one street, but as a result of electoral pressures, these policies were abandoned, and citizens were allowed to replace their government homes with others, something similar to “ethnic cleansing” whereby entire residential areas were transformed into housing for one category of the population, in which they have sectarian or tribal weight, at the expense of national unity.

It has also become acceptable for government employees who live in cities close to the capital to refuse to work in semi-remote areas, for well-known reasons – the remote areas that are no more than 60 or 70 kms away.

Although the door to naturalization of the population, especially for the original first category, was officially closed after the completion of the naturalization of everyone, the government returned at a later period and granted citizenship, from the first category and this contributed to the entry of the elements who do not know loyalty other than their personal interests.

The government also allowed itself to meet the demands of the heads of various groups, and did not even object to some of them using the label “amir,” and this prompted their followers to gather and rally around them.

All of these and other matters contributed to the further fragmentation of society, and so many became loyal to the dinar, through class or tribalism, and not to the homeland under whose constitution we all take shelter as it is the social contract that we accepted, and which a large group does not even know its existence.

Then came the values document, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, to clearly show how the society was divided into two parts, and it is not known who will prevail in the end, bearing in mind that the number of those who supported the document from the outer regions amounted to 37 candidates, while the number of those who supported it from the inner regions did not exceed 11, and those who belonged to religious parties.

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By Ahmad alsarraf