With oil, money comes to you in your sleep; with debt, money comes to you by crawling. With work, money comes to you by sweating.
MENA’s oil boom is a perfect illustration of the cohabitation between the permanence of endemic moral misery and the existence of abundant financial resources.
The high price of oil has structurally the perverse effect of perpetuating the systems put in place to infinity. Because of oil and gas, America has lost all moral sense. Through the grace of oil and gas, a typical MENA’s oil exporter no longer thinks, it spends. And it pays without counting. It does not need economists; those are holiday troublers; it prefers to deal with merry lurons.
It has a visceral desire to entertain the gallery. The public does not ask for so much. Money is flowing. And let the rentier industry live! An industry that does not need a strategy, seminars, speeches, no supply problems, no market problems. It runs at full capacity, and it can do without any government and parliament. It works on its own and is not accountable to anyone, not even to itself. It is royally free from the productive work and creative intelligence of Algerians, Libyans and GCC inhabitants. An industry that cradles illusions, those from the top and feeds the despair of others, those at the bottom.
Finally, an industry that works from, by and for abroad. An annuity that oil-consuming states compete for or share tax to finance their mesmerising democracy and producing countries cheaply to perpetuate the obsolete political regimes in place with high costs. The largest share goes to influential locals or foreigners.
Some were supporting each other, and vice versa. A society that does not think of itself is a society that is slowly but surely dying. The life of a nation ceases, it is said, when dreams turn into regrets. Oil has made institutions, pale copies of those of our illustrious Western thinkers, empty shells bloated and budgetivorous, without impact on society, intended to camouflage reality to view of the foreigner, but no one is fooled. The world today no longer believes in Santa Claus.
At the slightest drop in the price of a barrel of oil, they collapse like a house of cards. They serve only as a storefront in the eyes of international opinion. Non-hydrocarbon exports are insignificant. Yet only labor can oppose oil. But it is marginal. It has accounted for less than 2% of exports over the past several decades. Is this not the apparent sign of the failure of so-called public economic policies that have only the funds, carried out by successive elites and who today have converted into opposition or Islamism.
Democracy is a view of the mind in a rent economy dominated by politics. Any political opposition that relies on hard-working forces is doomed to failure. The weight of inertia is predominant; the living muscles are weak. Work has lost its credentials; it bows to the diktat of oil. It is access to petrodollars that guarantees wealth. Easy money fascinates.
On another register, who better do without the hen with the golden eggs? Of course not anyone. Would a prolonged and increasing decline in the price of hydrocarbons, reserves or markets be life-saving or lethal for the country? What did the natives live on before the discovery of oil in 1956 by the French?
The nation-state is a dupe market between a power and a nation, namely bread against freedom, security against obedience, order against anarchy, external recognition against internal legitimacy. The concept of the welfare state is a convenient fraud that the population believes that providence is at the top of the State and not in the Sahara desert subsoil. One of the criteria for immediately determining whether a nation belongs to the third world is corruption.
Wherever the representatives of the State, civil servants, or politicians, from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy are corrupt and where this practice is almost official, we are in a third world country. The membership of people in the third world is above all its political system. The Arab world is dominated by authoritarian or totalitarian powers, by political castes that manipulate words and institutions. This is why no one now believes in development; everyone sees the corruption of political power daily.
Governments have deliberately chosen economic growth from the accumulation of oil and gas revenues or to the absence of debt pledged on hypothetical reserves rather than on development and internal mobilisation based on training and employment of men. The States have carried out a vast salary generalisation whose overall social effect is the dependence in which a significant proportion of the working population is located about the income distributed by the State from the revenues export of hydrocarbons to retain an increasingly large and demanding customer base.
The essence of the economic and socio-political game is, therefore, to capture an ever-increasing share of this pension and to determine which groups will benefit from it. It gives the State the means to redistribute clientelist. It frees the State from any fiscal dependence on the population and allows the ruling elite to dispense with any need for popular legitimisation. It has the extraordinary turnaround capabilities stifling any attempt to challenge society.
The oil will be the engine of corruption in business and the fuel of social violence. It has the art of war and initiating peace. It is both fire and water. He sometimes acts as an arsonist, sometimes as a fireman. It is one thing, and its opposite; wealth and poverty, both are illusions.
And as with any illusion, there is a manipulator. We are our gravediggers. To get out of the hole we are sinking into, every day more, we have to stop digging because the solution is on dry land and not at the bottom of a hole. To do this, you have to raise your head, stand up straight, and look yourself in the eye, in all humility, without fear and reproach. You have to arm yourself with science and have faith in God. Science is the key to our problems, religion the ultimate goal of our brief existence.
Oil intoxicates us; gas pollutes us, easy money blinds us. It’s dirty money. Money that kills, corrupts, rots, destroys consciences. It is the petrodollars that run the country and give it its substance and stability. The institutions, empty shells, are only there as a garnish to make the “cake” appetising. “Oil is the devil’s excrement; it corrupts countries and perverts’ economic decisions” Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, the founding father of OPEC Venezuela 1970.
Author: Dr. A. Boumezrag
