Translating 'governance' and 'good governance' into Arabic has never been easy. Even for scholars in the region. The World Bank faced this problem when it came out with a report in 2003. During the 1990s, scholars in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region debated it acriminously as political, religious, linguistic and regional considerations posed myriad problems. Finally, the World Bank MENA report accepted the least controversial terms 'idarat al-hokm' and 'al-hokm al-jayyed' for governance and good governance respectively.
No less elusive than translation of the terms has been their practice on the ground by the rulers in the region.
Take Egypt, one of the countries in the MENA region. Millions of protestors gathered at the Tahrir Square in Cairo have been forced to come together by nothing but President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades of misrule. The unceasing chant for Mubarak’s removal is a collective cry for just idarat al-hokm. People in Egypt and, in fact, the entire Arab region have been denied idarat al-hokm, let alone al-hokm al-jayyed, despite this country’s early brush with parliament and constitution way back in 1923. “Although the wave of protests was set off by economic complaints, it is wrong to think that it was all about the economy – the true threat to stability in the Arab world is poor governance,” Marwan Muasher recently wrote in the Guardian newspaper about the ongoing protests.
That explains why ripples originating from Tahrir Square travelled across the region with such rapidity – even as it all began with Tunisia’s jasmine revolution in December. Yemen, Jordan and Algeria are among the countries that have been rattled under the impact.
Mubarak’s 30 years of misrule have hit Egypt hard. “Egypt was ranked in the bottom half (101 of 169) of countries, and placed at 108 of 169 countries on inequalities in life expectancy, education, and income,” says the 2010 Human Development Index. Another report, by Transparency International, found rampant corruption in Egypt. Its 2010 corruption perception index ranked Egypt 98 out of 178 countries with a score of 3.1 out of 10. The country was beset with high tax evasion, corruption and inefficient management. And, Freedom House, 2010 report showed the political score of Egypt was 6/10, civil liberties – 5/10 and its status ‘not free’.
In Egypt’s sham democracy, as per a 2008 survey, “Eighty-three percent subsidies went to the non-poor, regarding electricity, 76 percent went to the non-poor, regarding petroleum, 87 percent went to the non-poor and finally 76 percent of the social safety net subsidy went to the non-poor.”
So there was a broad disconnect between the government and people in a country known for its tolerant and pluralistic society with three millennia of civilisation.
The global economic meltdown only exacerbated people's suffering in Egypt. Its economy based on tourism and American aid (second largest after Israel in the region) failed to eradicate poverty. In a country of eight crore, poverty is as high as 40 percent and unemployment hit a jarring 20 percent, based on unofficial count (official figures put it at 10 percent). Ninety percent of the country’s unemployed are youth.
At last, Egyptians, with an average age of just 24, just had enough. The protests are a rallying cry against corrupt authoritarian government, uneven development and social disenfranchisement. The message to powers that be across the region and, indeed, the world is clear: you can’t get choke the demand for al-hokm al-jayyed, or good governance, for ever.
