Role of the Media towards Fighting Corruption [Archives:2006/909/Letters to the Editor]

Ashwak Malik Aleryani
Sana'a
I would like to thank Hakim Al Masmari on his article “Traffic Police Want Their Qat Money”, and also the Yemen Times newspaper for bringing up such issues. I believe that the media has a bigger role to play as to highlighting the negatives of every society in order to expose these malpractice in the eyes of the blind and to awaken the eyes of those asleep.

The article was very clear in pointing out the traffic police treatment of drivers when a simple violation occurs. Simply transportation drivers, whether they are truck, buses, or taxi drivers are violating the law themselves as much as the traffic police. Both sides are committing violations to the law, while both must know that “the Law is above all”, they can not provide excuses to commit a violation and rectifying a violation can not be through committing another violation. Such conduct encourages blackmailing and more corruption. I can not say, “I stole because I am poor, and that I shouldn't be punished for that”.

Each and every man has his future within his own hands and through education and good ethics everyone can guarantee his future, and live a descent life. When a man has these good qualities and found the doors of success closed a head of him, it is then that he can blame others or the government for what he is in.

Those who are graduating each year from different faculties did their best to study for four whole years or more to guarantee a future for them selves, then they end up unemployed, unable to get a descent job, or rent a house to create a little family which each one of them had been dreaming of. They suddenly finds that all their dreams, which they have been accompanied by during their years of studying, are totally destroyed, due to the lack of employment. The government is then to blame for not putting an account and plans for thousands of those graduates. No factories, hospitals, schools are being built, all we can see is the prosperity of the construction work of new villas, high tower buildings, which are being built overnight; and who do they belong to? I will end up my article by this question which I am sure that each and every noble citizen in Yemen would have an answer to that.
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