ReflectionsFalse endowments, Basura’s efficiency and the Houthisms [Archives:2004/768/Opinion]

By Yahya Al-Olfi
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Sana'a During the seventies of the past century was a rather small city, barely emerging from a middle ages time capsule free from hundreds of years of Imamic oppressive rule and strangling isolation. Landplots at the time were very cheap because many Yemenis avoided living at the capital due to its contentious situation at the time. The years of stability, which followed that period, made real-estate business a prosperous lucrative business. Some people became millionaires all of a sudden because of selling landplots with an ever-increasing demand by newcomer inhabitants from all over Yemen, due to the centralization of administration and services. Thus, many people coveted non-owned lands and in order to justify their ownership for such large portions they at times counterfeited title documents and mostly claimed that they were within their hands as endowment property. Thus, in arrangement with the ministry of endowment, they sold landplots and purchasers were required to pay a lump sum to the endowment ministry in addition to the price already paid to the de facto owner . Now, that this has happened, it would be wise for the Ministry of endowment to suffice itself with what it has received from purchasers and to do away with further demands for rental money. Knowing that most newly sold landplots were in fact fake endowments, namely outside the typical city, during the eighties and nineties of the past century.
Assuming that the landplots were endowment property, they were left religiously for good purposes not for annoying purposes let alone the reality in that they were nobody's property and their values have been already paid. The ministry would do good maintaining clear-cut endowment property rather than tracking false ones.
Mr. Basura, the rector of Sana'a University was recently a subject of some negative comments in certain newspapers in that he is inefficient and so forth. The man earned good reputation when he was a rector in Aden. In my humble opinion I think the man is qualified for such competency if it was not for some influential interventions here and there. The man should have sufficient free hand to run the university affairs and be able to get rid of elements giving the university a bad name. I personally have discovered bad performance on the part of the university's general registrar Mr. Al-Assali and his collaborator Mohammed Solaiman. These two elements in my opinion are fit to work as farmers tilling the land not hold positions in the university where they blackmail people and make them come and go for several months in vain. I am one of those who have been subjected to their misbehavior and of course felt angry at Basura's commissioning of such elements to run affairs they are not qualified for. In fact people have dubbed the General Registrar as the General Obstacles-Maker (in Arabic Al-Moaarqil Al-Aam). The rector, in order to win good reputation as when he was the rector of Aden university should inspect the performance of his underlings because their mismanagement reflects upon him negatively or positively according to people's impressions.
A man well-versed in Yemeni history, told me ” n order for Yemen to avoid future Houthisms openness should be addressed to issues implicating religious heritages and that the fact of the transformation from Persian descent to Hashemite pedigree should be alluded to clearly and that if this is done the majority shall for sure decide to shed off this distinctive oddity knowing that it would give them a bad image and hence we would be able to avoid once and for all future-like displays of such a repugnant chronic disease.
On the other hand, this week, I read the newspapers which are classified by the government as sympathetic with the religious daft Al-Houthi and his fellow idiot fanatic combatants and deduced as follows: The YSP mouthpiece says that they are against the government's waging war against a certain group due to their belief and that the government ought to exercise law and order in Sana'a first before it decides to wage war elsewhere. Here the YSP contradicts itself and its principles and has gone astray for if the primitively minded clique were pacifist, there would have been no war in the first place. The Hadaoist newspaper, Al-Umma of “Al-Haq party” which people dub as “Haqalkhomos” i.e. claimants of one fifth of the country's wealth because of their alleged lineage to the celestial Jewel and that they are as such considered Yemen's cr'me de la cr'me. This newspaper calls the war on Shiite fanatics as an unnecessary daft mission, which has certainly proven its being a complete miscalculation. Truly, it is a grave miscalculation by the government to have permitted such a disease to grow unattended, while in the meantime it is every wise man's duty to praise the government in its endeavor to get rid of these backward devil henchmen, lest Yemen deteriorates even further. Aamir, a wily columnist in Alshoura newspaper accuses the people siding with the war against Shiite terrorists as people clinging to the past. The man is contradicting himself for he is writing in a newspaper deep to its forehead in obsolete and antique impractical thinking appropriate to jungle dwellers not people living in the twentieth century.
It is idiotic to make our anger from the government, blind us from differentiation between what is right for our country and what is wrong, here there is a lack of patriotism. Writers ought to respect their readers and I have stopped being an avid reader of Aamir's column because of the nonsense he uttered in Al-Shoura edition 497 because, deploringly, his claims are solely applicable on himself and the newspaper he wrote for.
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