If we are unable to have, for more than thirty years, a postal administration whose primary mission is to receive a letter from a person or entity, inside or outside Kuwait, and deliver it to the addressee, inside or outside the country, then how can we succeed in managing the country’s economy, developing education, and proceeding with development, reducing dependence on oil, and 1,242 other problems?

For almost ten years, I have been criticizing the existence of an “authority” for printing the Qur’an, in light of the presence of several reliable entities that can provide us with all our needs of the Qur’an, noting that the establishment of this authority, which has failed over the course of 13 years and ten governments, to print a single copy of the Qur’an came only to achieve partisan and personal benefit, and not for a necessary need!

For years, I have been criticizing the existence of 6 governorates, with six governors, with diverse experiences, but none of them knows with certainty, even close to half-certainty, the reality of their mission, nor the reason for the millions of dinars that are spent and wasted, for no real reason, and the calamity is the number of people working in the governorates.

There are approximately 300 civilian and military employees, and the number of people working in the Supreme Council for Provincial Affairs exceeds approximately two thousand civilians and military personnel, that is, five employees, who do almost no specific work, to supervise the work of 300 employees who do almost no work.

These are just a few examples that His Highness the Prime Minister can use to improve the work environment and raise morale in society, which has completely despaired of the coming of reform!

The deterioration of the postal service, and the entire entity of the Ministry of Communication, began before Saddam’s occupation, and the situation worsened even more after the liberation, and it became a ministry devoid of spirit, especially after the establishment of Communications and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA), ten years ago, which quickly became the incompetent entity from which it separated itself.

Several government agencies have tried to develop the postal service, by outsourcing the matter to private companies, but all their attempts have failed, and no one knows the reason, or wants to know, so how can we become a financial center, semi-international, if we are unable to outsource mail distribution to a local company?

I remember that one day, one of the Ministers of Communication decided to float a tender related to outsourcing the printing and distribution of 300,000 landline telephone bills.

So 10 companies submitted the tender, and their average prices were one million dinars. One company deviated from them and submitted an offer of 75 thousand dinars, so the minister decided to award the tender to this company, and within hours the error was revealed. The company apologized for not carrying out the task, so its guarantee was confiscated, and the minister decided, at the time, and this was almost forty years ago, to stop printing and distributing phone bills, to this day!

Like many other things that have deteriorated, the postal service, until the mid-seventies, was good and fast, and with the increase in workers, including scholars and unemployment, its situation declined, or something like it.

My friend Hamad says that he sent a large envelope with Abdul Samad to the post office, after he wrote the address of the addressee on a label. The postal employee, “the scholar,” objected and asked to write the address on the same envelope, and advised him to deliver the envelope to the Farwaniya post office, so that it would be sent on the same day, to the airport, or else it will be delayed, because mail is collected from the rest of the offices twice a week only.

Some people pray to God not to change us!

e-mail: [email protected]

By Ahmad alsarraf