Rami G. Khouri

Like most public political dramas across the Middle East, the current events in Lebanon revolving around uncollected garbage are really about several different issues that have merged into one.

At the most basic level felt in every household is the urgent need to fix the government’s ability to deliver critical public services, such as water, electricity and garbage disposal. Public anger boiled over this month partly because of the visible problem of piles of uncollected garbage everywhere, but more so because of outrage over the uncaring and disdainful attitude of the government. As navigating the basic needs of daily life became more difficult for most people, they became incensed at seeing their government postponing meetings and decisions while living in their privileged world in which they never feel the problems of electricity, water and garbage.

The second issue at hand today is the financial cost that households must bear due to the government’s inefficiency and disdain for its own citizens. The accumulation of deficiencies in numerous public services over the last few years has reached the point where for most citizens the basic irritation with erratic services was exacerbated by the need to also pay for securing those services from private providers. Most households in Lebanon now must pay twice for basic services such as electricity and fresh water – once to the government, and again to a private-sector provider to fill in the gaps in the government service. This dual payment system also operates in sectors such as telephone communications, cable television, education, health insurance and others, reaching a point where many families simply cannot afford to pay for the basic services that once were provided efficiently by the state.

This links to the third issue at hand, which is the widespread perception that a core problem in all these matters is corruption in the public and private sectors, which allegedly operates at two levels: initially, public officials delay issuing contracts for basic services such as rubbish disposal because they cannot agree on how to share the spoils of contracts and commissions; and subsequently political and communal leaders rake in millions of dollars from their links with the licensed or pirate private firms that sell citizens those services they are not getting from the state. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at play in both areas, and citizens are the ones who suffers the most.

The fourth issue the protesters are starting to challenge – and this is really historic for Lebanon – is the underlying confessional and sectarian nature of the political power-sharing system in Lebanon, which basically has ground to a halt in the last two years because of irreconcilable differences among key players. The Lebanese model of governance formally divides executive, legislative, bureaucratic and security-sector power among the country’s leading religious sects.

This system that has operated since the country’s independence in 1943 has led today to almost permanent gridlock, mainly because after the Syrians left Lebanon in 2005 the two main Lebanese political blocs have been at each other’s throats – the Saad Hariri-led, Sunni-majority March 14 coalition, and the Hezbollah-led, Shiite-dominated March 8 coalition that is allied with the biggest single Christian party, Gen. Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement. The sectarian power-sharing that for decades gave all Lebanese equitable access to the halls of power has collapsed in the last decade, creating a bankrupt and mostly immobilized system whose work is stopped by any one side pulling out of the arrangement.

Ordinary citizens who benefited from the sectarian system now suffer its deficiencies. They now seem to be serving notice that they demand and deserve a government that delivers basic services more efficiently and equitably to all citizens, because only the senior officials of all the religious groups in the land seem to benefit from the old power-sharing formula.

The fifth issue at play behind all of these matters is the deepest and most difficult one. It is the urgent but elusive need to reconcile the military and political power of Hezbollah with the power of the central government. This glaring gap in the integrity of the national governance and security systems has been most evident since the Israeli withdrawal from the south of Lebanon in 2000, and the Syrian withdrawal five years later. When Hezbollah and its Christian FPM ally cannot agree with the Sunni-dominated Hariri-led forces over basic policies, the entire system grinds to a halt. Electricity is cut. Garbage piles up. Some households go broke.

Some Lebanese charge that this blockage is deliberately engineered to force a revision of the assorted national pacts that share power among the main confessional groups, aiming to change the 50-50 Christian-Muslim formula to a 30-30-30 one in which Sunnis, Shiites and Christians each would broadly have one-third of key positions in parliament and government. Whatever the truth, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are likely to be on the streets this Saturday at a major national demonstration that seeks to resolve these five related issues that have shattered a once functional government.

The critically important new development here is that citizens are taking to the streets in their individual capacity to demand their rights and not only as members of one religious group or another sent to demonstrate by their leaders.