Photo: Lebanese Examiner
More than a week ago, the city of Beirut ceased trash collection when the landfill stopped accepting deliveries. It turns out the city’s biggest landfill is, well… full. Since then, the streets of this beautiful capital on the Mediterranean Sea have been filled with piles of garbage, rotting in the summer heat– 20,000 tons and counting. This creates obvious health hazards, and undercuts the city’s peak tourist season. Many residents are wearing masks to deal with the stench.
The Lebanese people are rightfully outraged. They see the garbage crisis as a manifestation of larger institutional failures. The country has been without a president for more than a year, and the parliament has extended its own mandate until 2017 without holding elections. The political deadlock breeds institutional paralysis, which in turn exacerbates corruption in a destructive cycle. Essential services like electricity, water, and, sure enough, waste removal are disrupted. CIPE’s longtime partner and Lebanon’s leading anti-corruption watchdog, the Lebanese Transparency Association (LTA), is not sitting idly by.
For more than a decade, CIPE and LTA have championed various reforms to combat corruption, including expanding access to information (ATI) and protecting whistleblowers. Our recent project produced an ATI guidebook as a tool to mobilize the business community to push for final passage of an ATI law pending before parliament (and which LTA was instrumental in drafting as a leading member of the National Network for the Right of Access to Information). LTA also pursued passage of a whistleblower protection law (also pending before parliament) that will prohibit retribution against those who report instances of corruption.
LTA filled trash receptacles with anti-corruption bills that have been languishing in Parliament for years and delivered them to parliamentary offices.
Such laws are critical elements in the fight against corruption. To remind parliamentarians of the importance of these issues, LTA has distributed trash receptacles to the offices of the parliamentary blocs filled with the draft laws. Called “A special gift for your reluctance,” this tongue-in-cheek offering expressed deep discontent with the government’s inaction on these vital issues, the consequences of which are made painfully clear by the waste crisis. LTA is calling on parliamentarians from all parties to “clean the country of corruption”.
Strengthening the institutional underpinnings of a functioning democracy is as important to Lebanon’s development as removing the trash from the streets of its great capital.
Stephen Rosenlund is a Program Officer for the Middle East & North Africa at CIPE.
