Why Yemen is searching for international financing? [Archives:2006/997/Business & Economy]
By: Raidan Abdulaziz Al-Saqqaf
[email protected]
President Ali Abdullah Saleh is counting on the success of the upcoming donors conference in London to fulfil the many promises he has made over the years as well as the current promises during the electoral campaign. He gave top priority to economic reform, poverty alleviation and microeconomic development. The promises made by President Saleh were bold and unless backed up by committed funds and a dedicated government then the trust the public gave him will very likely to disappear.
President Saleh is to lead the Yemeni delegation to the donors conference because a failure to raise the needed funds and fulfil those promises is unacceptable, but it is a possibility. Yemen has received considerable funds during the last few decades under Saleh's leadership, any banker or donor will take a look at the credit history of the party at hand, so the logical question is to examine if the previous funds were put into a good and constructive use or were dumped in the purchase of weapons or running the day-to-day affairs of bureaucracy or do they actually improve the quality of life for those governed.
Has the little resources, and income, been used efficiently? How much has Yemen been investing into its own future? Has Yemen been trying to help itself during the last five years? My question is how can the International community help Yemen develop if Yemen itself is unwilling to help itself? Corruption and poverty are on the rise and the previous development plans failed, but no university or academic institute, no think-tank, no political party and no intellect attempted to explain why the 1997-2003 economic and fiscal reformed failed.
Even if the donors conference is successful, there is no point in funding Yemen's third national plan if it is destined to fail like its predecessors, after all, those are the same people who jotted down the previous plans and took the very same factors into consideration. The hidden agenda behind the donors conference is not to genuinely development the livelihood of the Yemeni people in the micro level, it is to save the political career of the ruling party after making promises it knows it cannot deliver.
Yemen's problems are plenty and more diverse than one might think and a strategy of political reform might give the government the credibility it needs to formulate a strategy of economic reform, however the current circumstances of the nation and the people is too fragile to experiment through trail and error, the donors conference may not be repeated every year and the international community is unwilling to put funds in inefficient hands. Government officials admit that if this conference fails – either in raising the funds or in proper utilization of funds – then there is nothing but remorse for the average man who will continue suffering increasing hardships and a deteriorating quality of life.
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