An Arab spring of culture

SINGAPORE — I am writing from Singapore but these thoughts were formed in Bahrain. I hardly expected it would be a woman that would change my ideas about Bahraini society. Like others who do not know much about Arab society, it is thought that women do not have a public role in society.

Imagine my surprise to find a woman in Bahrain who not only plays a very public role in the shaping of society she is at the center of it. She is H.E. Sheikha Mai bint Mohammed al Khalifa, the Minister of culture and information. She is bent on digging deep at the roots of Arab culture to create a tool to unite Bahraini society. “We have more things in common in history and culture than we are aware of,” she said.

Although she belongs to the royal family she is her own woman, has a vision for her country and works hard at it.

I sat next to her during the presentation of the BICI report on human rights abuses and King Hamad Al-Khalifa’s response in Shakhir Palace earlier. When I made an appointment to see her, she insisted that I see first “the houses.”

“The houses” were a cluster of old houses built around the Nukhidhah house during the heyday of the pearl industry. Nukhidhah was the home of the commander (captain) of a pearling ship. In Bahrain, first there were pearls, and then there was oil. Shaikha Mai has done a good job to recreate what life was like then when pearls were its source of livelihood. The house has two parts, one for the family that was kept private and the other was for the majlis where the captain would receive his constituents, buyers and friends. From old ruins, the shaikha undertook a renovation of architectural excellence: the new building would retain the essential “memory of place” but assume a contemporary look of stark simplicity reminiscent of minimalist architecture.

I told her that I immediately related to the place because I live in such a minimalist house myself, so starkly simple that it makes no accommodation for the look of others around it. It was designed by my daughter, Marta Welsh, an architect in London. It got me thinking — here is a basic structure that seems to have gone around from the Middle East deserts to Southern Spain to London, Sentosa Singapore and Alabang. There must be a universal aching for basic design shorn of all ornamentation shared by the architects.

Sheikha Mai wants to impart not only to Sunnis but to all that live in Bahrain, including disgruntled Shiites that they belong to each other. They are all bound to it as their homeland despite differences in interpreting history of Islam. She talked about projects — past and future.

As I headed for the door she called an aide who handed me what must be the heaviest book I would handcarry with me across the world — The World heritage of the Arab Countries. Bahrain became the center of this important task to remind the world that this region was the cradle of civilization and where the three monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam were founded.

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Home away from home is the internet. With a click, I am back home reading the news from home.

With all due respect to Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Gregorio Honasan’s appeal for sobriety in the case against former President and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, it would have been more mature if they simply said that what the Aquino government is doing is wrong because it destroys our institutions.

The Aquino government should follow the due process because it is right that they do so and not because the European Union or any other foreign country was looking. The attack on our justice system is more harmful to the nation than it is against former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. If this was the perspective of the Santiago-Honasan statement — to defend the country’s institutions — it would have been more praiseworthy and would have added also to our understanding of sovereignty.

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On the column on conditional cash transfer, I stand corrected by someone who knew it first hand.

“It was started by former President Arroyo at the time of the financial crisis, as a lifeline for the most vulnerable and the least-provisioned to survive the financial crisis. This was a stop-gap measure to mitigate the crisis’ impact on the poor. Dinky Soliman implemented this so she knows the whole rationale.

Even before the cct, the Arroyo government was already into MSME in a huge way. The micro small and medium enterprise program was our “teaching how to fish”. Of course the program continues, especially the partnership with the private sector in “go negosyo”, but you don’t hear much of it from the government side. Perhaps this should be the background to understand observation from India where cct is also just beginning the experiment. Above all, cash transfer is not an end in itself.

There is no known cct monitoring or reporting system in spite of all the protestations of openness and transparency by this government. The senate and/or house should create an oversight committee.

It is past 3 quarters for this year alone, and reports about performance of cct are at best spotty, at worst nil.

It has been announced that the cct would be deployed electronically by atm. With the number of claimed beneficiary families, how were the accounts opened by Land Bank, given the requirements for documentation and forms. If you do the time and motion, what kind of logistics would it have required for the bank to process the new accounts, for the beneficiary to go to the bank. There is an existing list from the Arroyo cct, but was this adopted entirely, purged, updated, truncated, etc?

There was a plan to hire 4,000 additional cct staff. Has there been an audit of this staff? The projected budget for administrative cost of cct was P4 billion. Has this been audited? With a full staffing of 4,000, the P4 billion budget would mean P1 million for each staff — P4 billion is P4,000 millions! 

The DSWD should be asked to provide the specifics, to post the list of beneficiaries and the status of their compliance with the conditions for the cash transfer, to post the names of cct staff, the cct infrastructure, and how to liquidate the cct cash advances, ” Good suggestion.