IN 1933, the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the start of his presidential term, enacted the tradition of the “first 100-day mission in the White House” during which he worked on implementing his economic plan to rescue his country from the Great Depression that had devastated it for over four years.
Since then, this matter has turned into a nightmare for every elected president, as the latter has to prove his worth and the extent of his strength through what is implemented during those three months and ten days. This period, by the way, is the waiting period for women after divorce among Muslims.
Suppose that the current government was born immediately after the announcement of the start of the summer recess of the National Assembly, which lasts about three months. This currently is sufficient time to implement some of its plans it had announced during the oath-taking session, especially with regard to the economic aspect, which is very similar to the case of the United States in the 1930s.
This is a great opportunity for the government to benefit from all the tools available to it, especially for managing public money, and improving indicators and classifications that have sparked pessimism among the general public.
It is useful to compare us with some countries that, despite the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy, were able to achieve huge gains, including the Norwegian Sovereign Fund, which achieved USD 46 billion during the first quarter of this year, and its wealth reached USD 1.2 trillion, and all indicators rose to the highest levels in Norway.
We are making this comparison due to some similarities between Kuwait and that Scandinavian country, at least in the management of the oil income, which is equivalent to a quarter of its economy.
In the field of economic renaissance, we can refer to the Chinese model, as that country was suffering from a major deterioration as a result of a stifling crisis left by decades of closure and totalitarian rule.
In 1978, China hired the Iraqi-born British administrative development scientist Elias Corgis. The first thing he started working on was the gradual transition to a market economy, and opening the door to foreign investment especially industrial. Within a few years, China became the world’s factory and the largest international investor in several fields. It has the largest sovereign investment fund among its peers, even though it was established 13 years ago with 200 million dollars and is worth a trillion dollars today.
The above two examples are indicative of good management and prudence in seizing opportunities to develop the capital cycle. If it is necessary to seek the assistance of experts from abroad, Kuwait, which was the first to establish a sovereign fund in 1953, fell in the ranking of such funds by several levels, while other countries that are most recent in this field had surpassed it.
In this regard, there is no place for the size of the countries or the size of population, but for awareness of the requirements of the stage, and ways to advance the state, for which clean hands and good morals are not enough.
The opportunity is presently available for the government, and there are a hundred parliamentary days off. In other words, there will be no parliamentary headache that would prevent it from working.
It has a Constitution that allows the issuance of decrees of necessity, with which it can work. If the parliament does not accept them in the next session, the two will divorce by dissolving the Parliament. This is because the most important thing is the appeasement of people, not the satisfaction of a handful of MPs and some dissonant voices on social media.
The future of Kuwait is more important than everything else.
By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times
