Blog post 4
David El Masri
PS101-Dr.Jenkins
April 28, 2022
Lebanon's corruption
Lebanon’s independence always seems to find its way through every blog post but since this is the last one it won’t be as bad. Lebanon’s so-called independence granted back in 1920 left some responsibility for the population to pick out a set of leaders that will effectively lead Lebanon. This period of Lebanon’s governance didn’t see much corruption because France had still a major impact on every decision taken, so there wasn’t much room for any of these leaders to find personal gain or benefit. However, during the second world war and while France was weakened, they decided to grant Lebanon its independence being afraid of Germany sending its military to take control of the allies’ colonies. The population of Lebanon was too divided for this to be true independence, the mix of different religions wanted to control Lebanon. From that point on every governmental decision was filled with some beneficial gain to certain religious groups over others. This is where corruption started and how every group started slowly but surely negatively affecting the population as a whole. Lebanon’s case includes a lot of problems and all these forms of governmental intrusions can be considered pure forms of corruption. This is extremely evident through the war against Israel that the Muslim population of Lebanon joined while the rest of the population completely opted out of interfering. This same exact war pushed the entire Lebanese population to suffer economically socially and mentally, it pushed it so far that international help was needed to actually stabilize the country and get the Israeli army out of the country.
After this traumatic experience was inflicted on the entire population, the religious-political communities wouldn’t try to settle their differences but actually create more problems. These problems progressively pushed each one of these groups to find a way to exploit the entire system to their advantage. This translates to creating plans something for the population for everyone to benefit from and over budget for this project so whichever group came up with it will go ahead and take part of the budget. This happened a lot and the growing tensions between these different groups lead to a civil war, that caused Lebanon's government to become a complete work of corruption. Each institution within the government had then been strictly associated with a specific group and nobody from any other religion would be hired to work in it. These boundaries were pushed even farther; these same institutions would become an easily exploitable opportunity for these groups to receive government-funded money for their own personal growth. This personal growth happens constantly throughout the multitude of governments formed and the fact that every single religious and political group ends up taking advantage of the system to grant themselves power and wealth slowly shows how corrupt the entire system as a whole was. People would be assigned and spend their entire time in their governmental position building their social image and wealth. This didn’t stop any certain group which progressively corrupted the population itself. Each citizen among the Lebanese population becomes so absorbed with their own benefit regardless of the entire population’s beneficial development that they would to extreme levels to make sure they aren’t being used by the system. Something the typical Lebanese citizen went ahead and did used and abuse the system for their own benefit in a form of rebellion against the system itself. In every form of a governmental institution, employees were demanding all forms of bribes to simply do their jobs. These political and religious groups found a very good way to gain even more public support. They would use the power they had in the government so that only members of their group would receive the bare minimum of governmental services that each citizen should receive. This level of corruption that has been growing since the civil war has been developing too much and has spread to a point that people aren’t granted the minimum unless they belong to a certain group. This slowly but surely affected the population as a whole and this made everybody turn against each other and this situation in particular made people worried about their own survival and neglected the development of the entire population. The country as a whole was suffering from this form of corruption. This ongoing and widespread corruption lead to massive mistrust in the government and all forms of affairs started becoming much more on an individual level and stopped being processed through the government in legal ways. This lack of organization on the governmental level made people working in the system quite dysfunctional and lead to even more problems and division.
The entire problem of corruption can be fixed through a lot of work that needs to start from the system itself. The system itself needs to apply the laws in a much better way that would stop letting people do whatever they want and abuse the system itself to create more beneficial situations for themselves and not the public. Alongside this enforcement of laws, a new reform should be done to stop somehow discontinue how things were and stop this entire form of corruption. To do that, an entire system must be rebooted from the ground up to slowly but surely create new forms of laws to be enforced. These laws should be accepted as the solution that will fix how people interact with the government itself and they would put aside their selfish desires and focus on the development of the country as a whole. This same example of creating a new functioning system from the bottom up that will make sure all interactions happen on a public level clear to everyone especially the public is seen in Sri Lanka which saw an entire transparency reform that lead to major improvements. Another way of dealing with corruption is by empowering citizens by making sure these citizens keep demanding a clean system that doesn’t exploit the government’s resources for the elected politicians to gain more things. This also means making sure all forms of public elections are monitored. The citizens that are looking to revolutionize the entirety of the system into a better corruption-free system will have to make sure that whatever activity that violates these newly formed ideas that are concerned with change would be punished through a fair judiciary system. This case can be seen in Slovenia; the public made sure to keep every single election as clean as possible by informing the public about what feeds into corruption and how politicians are able to rig and destroy the fair system. This showed some true progress and let people know some of the actions the politicians were taking were violating the system as a whole. The use of public funds in elections leads to the same system the public is trying to abolish. Lebanon has this form of revolutionary ideas brewing and wanting a big change and that growing population should be able to learn from its mistakes and try to imply what was effective in other systems.