One Question, Your Excellency - Ministry of Environment

4/25/2010

One Question, your Excellency!

Dear readers and partners in our faith in Lebanon,

The Lebanese Center for public information, faithful to its commitment to work incessantly to narrow the gap between the citizens and their "Dawle", has decided to start today a new mode of dialogue between the taxpayers and the Authorities.

This dialogue will take the form of some candid and direct questions that we shall address, at least once a day, to one of our thirty ministers and to the parliamentary commissions concerned on the subjects that most interest and sometimes puzzle the citizens.

We earnestly ask our ministers to answer these questions or have them answered directly on that blog or to the following email address: George@cpi-lebanon.org

We hope that this new initiative will serve in some small way to break down the barriers of incomprehension and suspicion that currently separate the taxpaying citizens from the tax collecting Authorities.

QUESTION NO.4 ADDRESSED TO HIS EXCELLENCY MR. MOHAMMED RAHAL, MINISTER OF ENVIRONMENT

Your Excellency,

We publish below some extracts from the table of contents of the 2001 Lebanon State of the Environment Report (LEDO), prepared by the Ministry of Environment and the Lebanese Environment and Development Observatory for the general public. The Table of contents included seven pages and covered the following subjects related to environment:

A. POPULATION AND ECONOMIC SECTORS
1. Population
2. Agriculture
3. Industry
4. Construction
5. Transport
6. Tourism and recreation
7. Energy

B. STATE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA
8. Water
9. Air
10. Biodiversity and natural heritage
11. Soils and Land

C. ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT
12. Legal and institutional framework
13. Land Management
14. Solid waste Management
15. Wastewater management

Your Excellency,

From that extensive coverage one can easily evaluate the extent and the depth of your responsibilities. Your Ministry is concerned with practically every aspect of the activities of our Public Administration. In fact, your Excellency, your Ministry should be regarded as one of the most important government ministries.

I am sure that you must be very busy and I would not like to waste any of your time. Allow me though to ask one single question:

“WHY THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY HAVE NOT BEEN INFORMED OF THE MEASURES THAT THE GOVERNMENT INTENDS TO TAKE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF THE EVERGROWING 500 TONS OF MUNICIPAL WASTE DUMP IN SAIDA?

CONSIDERING THE NUMEROUS AND COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS AFFECTING LEBANON, THE SAIDA DUMP BEING ONLY ONE ASPECT, WHEN WILL THE MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT DRAW UP A NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL PLAN FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS?

THE PLAN SHOULD LIST ALL THE INITIATIVES NEEDED TO DEAL WITH THESE PROBLEMS, ONE BY ONE, THEIR ESTIMATED COST, AND THE SCHEDULE AND THE TIME TABLE OF THEIR PROJECTED EXECUTION.”

As I mentioned in my previous addresses to the Ministers of Energy and Hydraulic resources, Agriculture, and Education, this National Plan will serve your Ministry, your eventual successor and the citizens of this country to better monitor its implementation. It will also serve to introduce some continuity in public governance. Finally we hope that it will encourage the foreign donors and the International institutions to actively fund these projects considering Lebanon’s present limited resources.

Respectfully yours,
George Sabat

A question your Excellency! - Ministry of Education

مشروع الإنماء التربوي

ماهية المشروع

مشروع الإنماء التربوي هو التسمية الجديدة لمشروع التعليم العام الذي أعيد هيكلة مكوناته، تحديد أهدافه وجدولة موازنته البالغة 70.9 مليون دولار أميركي ( 56.6 مليون دولار أميركي حصّة تمويل البنك الدولي – 14.3 مليون دولار أميركي حصّة تمويل الدولة اللبنانيّة)، وأصبح أيضاً يشمل بعض المكونات التي لم يتم تنفيذها من خلال قرض البنك الدولي العائد للتعليم المهني والتقني والذي أقفل رسميّاً في 31/12/2003.

يهدف مشروع الإنماء التربوي إلى: ”تسهيل بدء عملية الإصلاح في أنظمة التعليم العام والمهني عن طريق بناء قاعدة المعرفة وتعزيز النمو والجهوزيّة المؤسساتية في وزارة التربية والتعليم العالي“ تتلائم هذه الأهداف مع الأهداف الاستراتيجية للبنك الدولي الخاصة بلبنان (CAS): ”تنمية قاعدة الموارد البشرية بالتركيز على التعليم العام والمهني“. هذا ما يتماشى أيضا مع ”أولوية الحكومة اللبنانيّة لتوفير النوعية التربوية في المدارس الرسمية في سبيل الإنصاف وتحقيق الجودة“.

ويتألف المشروع من المكونات الاساسية التالية:

1. سياسة، تخطيط وإدارة المعلومات
• الإستراتيجية الوطنية للتعليم
• نظام معلوماتية الإدارة التربوية
• تسويغ النظام المالي التربوي
• التنمية المؤسساتيّة

2. تقوية الدور الريادي لمديري المدارس، القدرة التربوية، وتقييم التحصيل الأكاديمي
• التنمية الرياديّة
• تنمية كفايات المعلِم والمدرِِب
• تقييم التحصيل الأكاديمي

3. البنى التحتية والتجهيزات
• بناء المدارس
• توريد التجهيزات
• البنية التحتية لتكنولوجيا المعلومات والإتصالات

4. وحدة إدارة المشروع


4/23/2010

One Question, your Excellency!

Dear readers and partners in our faith in Lebanon,

The Lebanese Center for public information, faithful to its commitment to work incessantly to narrow the gap between the citizens and their "Dawle", has decided to start today a new mode of dialogue between the taxpayers and the Authorities.

This dialogue will take the form of some candid and direct questions that we shall address, at least once a day, to one of our thirty ministers and to the parliamentary commissions concerned on the subjects that most interest and sometimes puzzle the citizens.

We earnestly ask our ministers to answer these questions or have them answered directly on that blog or to the following email address: George@cpi-lebanon.org

We hope that this new initiative will serve in some small way to break down the barriers of incomprehension and suspicion that currently separate the taxpaying citizens from the tax collecting Authorities.

QUESTION NO.3 ADDRESSED TO HIS EXCELLENCY D. HASSAN MNEIMNEH, MINISTER OF EDUCATION

We address today our third question to His Excellency, D. Hassan Mneimneh, Minister of Education

Your Excellency, allow us to start by congratulating you for the Ministry’s web site which we have visited today and for the excellent updated information about the different activities of the Ministry that is published on that site. We have particularly appreciated the full account of your meeting with the 258 directors of secondary public schools in the presence of HE Bahia Hariry.

It is certainly gratifying for the citizens to see that their Ministers fulfill their duties enthusiastically and actively devote their time to the service of the taxpayers.

It also emboldens us to formulate the same question that we addressed yesterday to the Minister of Agriculture.

“YOUR EXCELLENCY, IN SPITE OF YOUR BUSY TIME SCHEDULE (you attended no less than ten events in ten days according to the web site), WILL YOU CONSIDER DEVOTING A FEW HOURS A DAY TO OVERSEE THE PREPARATION OF A NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL PLAN IN LEBANON FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS?”

This question arises out of our concern that the efforts that you are currently deploying should not be wasted, God forbids, if the next Minister decided to ignore them and adopted a new approach. We must not delude ourselves that this has never been the case in the past.

The concept of the NATIONAL PLAN is that, once it is adopted by the Council of Ministers and approved by Parliament, it will remain valid for the next five years and it can only be radically altered by the same institutions that voted for it.

Another important consideration to keep in mind is that this Plan will provide the guidelines, and the yardsticks against which the Ministry’s performance and budget will be evaluated (your ministry as well as the succeeding ones).

A further usefulness of the Plan is that, provided Civil Society is invited to participate in its formulation, the implementation of the Plan will not be met by the same popular agitation and troubles that we unfortunately witness today. If the syndicates of public and private teachers are invited to take an active part in the elaboration of the Plan they will be less likely to protest later when this Plan is put into execution.

I do not know if, like in the case of the Ministry of Agriculture, a National Educational Plan has already been prepared by your predecessors.Is the Educational Development Project that we have reproduced from the Ministry's site a Plan or just a Strategy? If it is a detailed Plan  please inform us if you intend to update it and publish it after its adoption by the Council of Ministers and Parliament.

Respectfully yours,

George Sabat

ONE QUESTION, YOUR EXCELLENCY - MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE

http://www.questionsfromcpi.blogspot.com




4/21/2010

One Question, your Excellency!

Dear readers and partners in our faith in Lebanon,



The Lebanese Center for public information, faithful to its commitment to work incessantly to narrow the gap between the citizens and their "Dawle", has decided to start today a new mode of dialogue between the taxpayers and the Authorities.

This dialogue will take the form of some candid and direct questions that we shall address, at least once a day, to one of our thirty ministers and to the parliamentary commissions concerned on the subjects that most interest and sometimes puzzle the citizens.

We earnestly ask our ministers to answer these questions or have them answered directly on that blog or to the following email address: George@cpi-lebanon.org

We hope that this new initiative will serve in some small way to break down the barriers of incomprehension and suspicion that currently separate the taxpaying citizens from the tax collecting Authorities.

QUESTION NO.2 ADDRESSED TO HIS EXCELLENCY D. HUSSEIN AL HAJJ HASSAN, MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE

Today our question number two is addressed to his Excellency, D. Al Hajj Hassan, Minister of Agriculture. This question concerns the Lebanese Agricultural Plan and is presented in two parts:

1) YOUR EXCELLENCY, WILL YOU KINDLY TELL US WHY THE AGRICULTURAL PLAN THAT WAS PREPARED BY THE MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE IN 2005 AND SIGNED BY H.E. ALY HASSAN EL KHALIL HAS NEVER SEEN THE LIGHT OF DAY AND AS A RESULT HAS NEVER BEEN IMPLEMENTED?


2) YOUR EXCELLENCY, WILL YOU KINDLY TELL US WHY THIS PLAN CANNOT BE NOW RECOVERED FROM THE ARCHIVES, UPDATED AND PRESENTED TO THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS FOR APPROVAL?

In fact we wish to know why the Lebanese Government has wasted a great deal of the taxpayer’s money (our money, your Excellency) and all the assistance that was provided by the FAO and other organizations like LEDO to prepare a very useful document of seventy eight pages only to ignore it later and let it fill up with dust on the archive shelves of the Ministry of Administrative Reform and in your Ministry? By the way, according to this Plan we were supposed to study and plan the execution of 316 lakes (bouhairas) of various sizes during the period 2005-2010. How many were studied in effect, your Excellency?

Surely, your Excellency, this is a very simple question that should not be so hard to answer.

Why can’t we dust up that Plan, and identify the parts of it that may have been (mistakenly?) executed since 2005? Why can’t we update this Plan to cover the period from 2010 to 2015?

This way, your Excellency, you will be able to identify and inform the citizens what parts of that Plan were executed during your mandate. But more importantly you will be able to hand over a guiding document to your successor who will assume the responsibility to carry out his mission more effectively.

Your colleague, H.E. Gebran Bassil, Minister of Energy and Hydraulic Resources recognized yesterday,
according to l’Orient Le Jour, the need for some well thought out planning for his ministry. We are sure that the Ministry of Agriculture is also in dire need of the same kind of planning, if not more.

We should not, every time that a new Minister takes over, have a new plan studied and prepared all over again. The current five year plan should be updated and amended, whenever necessary, but it should not be discarded and ignored altogether, otherwise there will be no CONTINUITY in the action of the government and the partnership between the citizens and the Authorities.

We look forward to hear from you on this Blog or in our email box at George@cpi-lebanon.org

Respectfully yours,

George Sabat

E-mail: ministry@agriculture.gov.lb

One Question, your Excellency! - Ministry of Energy and Hydraulic Resources.

Click to enlarge

Dear readers and partners in our faith in Lebanon,

Introduction

The Lebanese Center for public information, faithful to its commitment to work incessantly to narrow the gap between the citizens and their "Dawle", has decided to start today a new mode of dialogue between the taxpayers and the Authorities.

This dialogue will take the form of some candid and direct questions that we shall address, at least once a day, to one of our thirty ministers and to the parliamentary commissions concerned on the subjects that most interest and sometimes puzzle the citizens.

We earnestly ask our ministers to answer these questions or have them answered directly on that blog or to the following email address: George@cpi-lebanon.org

We hope that this new initiative will serve in some small way to break down the barriers of incomprehension and suspicion that currently separate the taxpaying citizens from the tax collecting Authorities.

1.- One Question, your Excellency!

Our question today is addressed to HE the Minister of Energy and Hydraulic Resources, Gebran Bassil and concerns, as one would have guessed, the problem of the electricity.

Minister Bassil, we shall not beat about the bush. We are already aware of the myriad of challenges that you currently face in this ministry and their huge negative impact on the economy of our country.

We have only one question in mind:

 “ WHY THE ACCOUNTS OF THE ELECTRICITE DU LIBAN FOR THE YEARS 2002 TO 2009 HAVE NOT BEEN AUDITED AND PUBLISHED, IN SPITE OF THE URGENT RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE  PARIS III FUNDERS SINCE 2006?"

When the citizens realize that the losses sustained by EDL in 2009 represented over seventeen per cent of all the taxes that they paid during that year, one cannot blame them for asking how and why these vast sums were lost.

The answer to this question can only come from the report of internationally accredited auditors who were specially appointed more than four years ago to perform this assignment.

Minister Bassil, we are very grateful for the immense efforts that you are deploying to solve the thousand and one problems that afflict EDL. We also appreciate that you are presently one of the few ministers to openly recognize the need for a FIVE YEAR PLAN for your Ministry, a plan that the citizens should be made aware of and approve. More importantly that Plan will also serve as a benchmark, a guideline and a yardstick to assist the future Energy ministers in their task. It will allow the citizens to monitor the implementation of that Plan during the next five years. When will your Plan be ready and when will the citizens be allowed to read it in extenso?

But we still insist on knowing why the EDL accounts have not been audited since 2001 and when it is expected that they will be? Unless this is done the heavy contribution to EDL losses reported in the Public Finance Monitor published every year by the Ministry of Finance will remain unexplained and unrelated.

I wish to quote one example that recently puzzled the experts. In 2009 the EDL loss contribution went down by 7% compared to 2008. During that same period the average price of crude oil in 2009 fell by 41%.

Only independently audited accounts can provide the answer to that puzzle.

Sincerely yours

George Sabat