Social citizenship and Joint Meeting Parties’ initiative [Archives:2007/1075/Opinion]
By: Dr. Abdullah Al-Faqih
The Joint Meeting Parties' initiative regarding the comprehensive political and national reforms, which was announced late in 2005, has not originated from the vacuum. Instead, it emerged at a time when equal citizenship was absent along with its political dimensions. Citizens' rights to participate in politics and enjoy their citizenship rights and public freedoms, as well to play an effective role in the political process were highlighted. As it is difficult for one to make a distinction between the political, economic, and social reasons that led to formulating the JMP's initiative for carrying out comprehensive political reforms, this article focuses on the social reasons or the so-called 'absence of equal citizenship', which represents the requisite or essential condition – even if it is not enough – to help people enjoy equal political rights and freedoms.
By the equal social citizenship we mean that any individual should enjoy all the social rights related with the different aspects of living that enable him/her assert themselves and develop their capacities to the maximum possible extent. The complete social citizenship can be achieved by granting everyone the right to have an equal access to education, healthcare, and liberation from poverty. In the absence of equal social citizenship, any individual in the democratic country becomes only a voter and not a citizen. But, in the non-democratic country, the community members will be merely subjects and not citizens while their political role is limited to obeying the ruler.
For the Republic of Yemen, it witnessed a great deterioration in the way people have access to equal social citizenship during the period 1995 – 2007. Before listing the indicators related with social citizenship, one of the famous Yemeni writers confirmed that the scores on situation deterioration are the best estimates. Compared to Yemeni government's stats, the scores provided by international organizations such as the UN Development Program (which are the mostly reliable scores) are more credible, particularly as the former usually lacks credibility and keeps on changing according to the preset goals. However, the Yemeni government's scores are estimates subjected to mistakes when attempting to assess a given situation but sometimes they evaluate situations correctly. These facts mainly concentrate on four basic rights, which are: the rights to have an equal access to education, obtain adequate healthcare, work and liberate oneself from poverty. All these stand for the minimum social rights accrued to human beings.
As far as the education-related right is concerned, the UNDP measures the level of education in its annual report on human development via two indicators: the rate of adults at age 15 years and over who are able to read and write in Yemen, in 2003, is one of the indicators. Yemen had the worse rate of literates worldwide as only 49 percent of the age group 15 years and over can read and write while 51 percent are illiterate. The other indicator is associated with enrollment rates in the different school grades. The Third National Report on Human Development in Yemen estimated the school age kids enrolled in schools at 60 percent of the total school age population. The report estimated children enrolled in the first nine grades of school at 64 percent of the total age group (5-14 years) population. It added that 75 percent of the total primary school age boys and 50 percent of the total primary school age girls have access to education. This means that half the female population is deprived of education.
The report went on to say that 50 percent of children enrolled in schools complete their primary education. According to the report, the situation of secondary education is worse, as only 40 percent of secondary school age boys and 5 percent of the girls are enrolled in schools. Additionally, the government and private universities admit only small numbers of high school leavers.
With regard to the right of having equal access to healthcare, the report used many indicators to assess the health situation in Yemen. The relevant figures concentrate on life expectancy after birth and the mortality rates of breastfed babies, under age 5 infants and pregnant women. Except for Sudan and Djibouti, life expectancy after birth in Yemen has one of the lowest rates in the Arab world. As life expectancy of Yemen's population is averaged at 61 years, it is estimated at 70, 72, and 74 years in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Oman respectively.
When it comes to labor and poverty, it is difficult for one to obtain authentic scores on unemployment rates in Yemen. There are scores via which the government attempts to reduce the estimates for political reasons while several international organizations interested in humanitarian issues work hard with the aim of providing authentic scores of what happens in real-life situation. Represented by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, the Yemeni government estimates unemployment at 17 percent of the overall workforce in 2005, but the Central Intelligence Agency estimated the unemployment in Yemen at 35 percent of the workforce while other estimates calculated the unemployment rates at 40 percent of the workforce.
Prior to the 1990 Reunification, the social development was controlled by the two regimes in both parts of the country. In South Yemen hard efforts were exerted to eliminate any bureaucracy and influential sheikhs and religious scholars under the cover of establishing equality in favor of the class of laborers, but the opposite happened in North Yemen where tribal and traditional sheiks were lavishly supported by the government at the expense of national development. All these phenomena and factors compelled leadership of the Joint Meeting Parties to propose a project for comprehensive reforms to help the country escape the bad consequences of the rampant corruption exercised in most of the government offices.
Source: Al-Wasat Political Weekly
——
[archive-e:1075-v:15-y:2007-d:2007-08-09-p:opinion]
