Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (29 page)

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Yemen’s Aden Ports Company and Dubai Ports International (35 per cent) and Abdullah Buqshan (15 per cent) announced the creation of a 50/50 joint venture company in April 2009.

I look at this country, and I see a plane ready to take off!

In what direction?

I can see you don’t believe me, said Faris al-Sanabani, pausing for another forkful of steak, But we have everything in Yemen!

The presidents smart public relations supremo, who doubled up as a wealthy businessman with his own security company and English-language newspaper, knew at least as well as I did that Yemen had almost nothing, that its oil and water were running out, that jihadism was on the rise, that corruption was endemic, southern secessionism à la mode and, at the time, a fifth Saada war was in the offing. Equally, we were both aware that the rule of law was a distant dream, the population exploding, unemployment running at 40 per cent and the president spending billions Yemen could not spare on Russian fighter planes.

It was March 2008 and only the previous evening a western diplomat had told me that, at a recent gathering of his counterparts from other western embassies, all had agreed that Salih’s removal from power was vital if Yemen was to avoid disintegration. But even with him gone, the diplomat had confided, not one of them had been able to suggest a plan to reverse the country’s decline. ‘Of course we’d start by raiding the president’s foreign bank accounts for a few billion dollars, but that wouldn’t stop the rot,’ he had said.

There was clearly no question of Yemen being about to ‘take off’, although from where al-Sanabani and I were sitting, dining off steak and chips in a fashionable restaurant in Hadda, a southern suburb of Sanaa, it was hard to believe the outlook was all gloomy. We were surrounded by unveiled, wealthy women from the Gulf States and foreign businessmen; the lighting was low, the air-conditioning soothing, the service attentive. Looking around me in that oasis of luxury, I might almost have swallowed al-Sanabani’s ludicrous line if I had never seen the dreary destitution of towns like Mocha or Marib, or the squalor of ancient Zabid, if I had not met women who had been married off at the age of nine, if I had not known that a city as vast as Taiz had no mains water supply for weeks on end, or that so much of rural Yemen remained without electricity or that around half the population could not read. I dreaded to think what the camps filled with people fleeing the on-off war in Saada were like, what out-of-bounds Saada itself looked like.

A mere twenty-minute drive from old Sanaa to wealthy Hadda is a journey from the third world to the first. Hadda’s clean, quiet avenues were lined with glamorous eateries and the fortress palaces of the rich and influential concealed behind high blank walls and iron gates, and protected by armed guards. I had visited a few of them. A former prime minister’s home boasted a basement library and a reception room the size of a hotel conference hall. While lunching at the palatial residence of a member of Yemen’s upper chamber of parliament, I had learned that the second power in the land, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, occupied a neighbouring mansion. Another gigantic marble-floored palace, the home of a former minister of transport, had a swimming pool and tennis court. The al-Ahmar clan’s stronghold in the capital, a cluster of high-rises in Hadda, was located not far from the American and British embassies with their anti-al-Qaeda fortifications. Al-Sanabani himself was proud to have built his own brand new home in Hadda of stone quarried from a whole mountain he had purchased near Marib, rather than from cement, and to have employed a skilled craftsman to create traditional stained glass and alabaster windows for him. In the main, however, the wealthy of Hadda seemed to have looked to the architecture of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States for inspiration, rather than to Yemen’s famously decorative native style.

In old Sanaa it is much easier to believe oneself in the remote and mysterious heart of Arabia, in a place with a claim to being the longest continuously inhabited city on earth, founded by one of Noah’s sons and visited by the Prophet’s father and son-in-law. Residing in one of the hundreds of high-rise fortresses fashioned of stone and brick with decorative frostings of white plaster-work around stained-glass half-moon windows, with uneven floors and steeply winding central staircases wafted by burning incense, one experiences a style of Yemeni life far more compellingly attractive than anything on offer in Hadda. In Hadda there are no sturdy, prettily patterned minarets greeting God’s new day with a crackle of amplified electronic feedback, before their muezzins’ preparatory coughs give way to the shattering surround-sound of the call to prayer. The rich of Hadda are too distant from the old city to enjoy the full effect of those competing wails mounting to heaven like the cries of hundreds of prisoners in an overcrowded dungeon, ricocheting off the nearby mountains and then fading to a sporadic grumble as more workaday noises start up in the narrow alleyways: the roar of engines and the braying of donkeys, the banging on old wooden doors and shrieking from high windows, all the sounds and stinks of the souk.

Barring a few restaurants, Hadda after nightfall is silent and dark, while old Sanaa is at its most seductive, the coloured half-moon windows of its high-rise palaces aglow with jewel light. After ruminating the afternoon away in their above-ground-level niches, on rolled carpets or battered car seats, with their qat and their bottled water and their cigarettes, the merchants and carpenters and blacksmiths in the souk are back in business. Each dimly gas-lit niche and cupboard shop is like a window opened in an advent calendar and, in the low glow of hissing paraffin lamps, a row of crouching qat sellers resembles a group of priests engaged in some mysterious pagan rite. Men returning from the
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with towels slung over their shoulders and a group of their elders lounging companionably on the steps of a mosque suggest the closest kind of community life, as does the fact that if one has visited old Sanaa more than once one is guaranteed to be recognised and greeted, as if one has never left. ‘You are welcome’ and ‘I love you’ shout the children in the only English they know. More than anywhere else in Yemen, old Sanaa has the power to persuade one that 9/11, Osama bin Laden and the global ‘war on terror’ are just sad, bad figments of the western imagination.

Our first-world Hadda surroundings and even the excellent steak were not improving al-Sanabani’s spirits. He began railing against Yemen’s mulish parliament; if the jet plane of Yemen was taking its time achieving lift-off, if the material gap between Hadda and the rest of Sanaa, old and new, was showing no sign of narrowing that was because, in al-Sanabani’s opinion, the ignorant tribesmen who accounted for the bulk of Yemen’s MPs were refusing to let the government speculate to accumulate by building a duty-free port at the Bab al-Mandab for example, or a new pipeline and refinery at Mukalla, or a big duty-free port north of Hodeidah, near the Saudi border. Al-Sanabani grabbed a paper napkin and impatiently scribbled a rough map of Yemen with some pipelines and percentages for me. It was really so simple, he said. Actually, he could not see any point in Yemen having a parliament. ‘What we need here right now is a dictatorship, not democracy,’ he told me, ’Carrots and sticks is what it takes. We should just leave people as they are - illiterate and without electricity - they’ve been that way for hundreds of years, after all - and just get in the investment from outside and make a start on these big projects. That’s the way to get jobs and growth -’ He stopped short, belatedly aware of the damage his cynicism was doing to his cause.

American-educated, impatient with his president’s costly and time-consuming dancing on snakes’ heads that often looked to him like a failure of a will to rule, he was tired and out of sorts. A young friend of his, a deputy of minister of international financial relations named Jalal al-Yaqoub, might be better placed to convince me of Yemen’s economic potential, he said. A few days later al-Yaqoub and I duly met, again in Hadda, in another fashionable establishment called The Coffee Trader, at an hour of the afternoon when most Yemenis were lounging at home consuming qat. The American-run café with its authentic Yemeni coffee, Wifi connection and pleasant courtyard garden was as outlandishly first world as the steak restaurant al-Sanabani had taken me to. A threesome of veiled teenage girls sat hunched and giggling over a single laptop. A few young men, dressed in jeans and T-shirts lolled in their chairs, idly scrolling up and down their screens.

In spite of a first, brave assertion that he was ‘tired of whining about how bad things are’, al-Yaqoub turned out to be far less persuaded of Yemen’s chances of pulling off an economic miracle than al-Sanabani had hoped. After a promisingly enthusiastic start - he and Ahmad, the eldest son of the president, were about to embark on an urgent mission to the US and Europe in search of skilled and educated compatriots who could be persuaded to return home to jobs in the higher echelons of the civil service and government - he slowly succumbed to gloom. It transpired that the proposed bait for these young ex-pats - essentially, ‘your country needs you’ - was highly unlikely to do the trick, given the level of remuneration on offer to those they would be relying on to carry out their commands. As a US-educated deputy minister, al-Yaqoub himself was guaranteed a basic monthly salary of only $250. ‘You can see now why no one with any talent wants a job in the civil service,’ he grumbled.

Al-Yaqoub repeated what I had heard many times, that no matter how well-intentioned, western-educated or even well-paid government ministers were, they soon discovered there was no efficiently working structure in place to implement their directives, that any lever they tried to pull would simply come off in their hands. He explained to me that the true function of the bloated civil service was not to act as an efficient machine in the service of the government but simply as a social safety net. Employees were assured of small but secure salaries in return for doing almost nothing except voting GPC when general election time came around, and for Salih as president whenever given the chance. Naturally enough, the inadequacy of their tiny salaries had led to endemic corruption; one could not procure a sick note, a passport, a job, or permission to build, for example, without bribing a civil servant. The judiciary branch of the civil service was described by 64 per cent of people polled in 2006 as the most bribe-ridden sector of public life, with cases of judges ruling in favour of whichever party offered the largest bribe.
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Corruption meant that discontent with Salih’s regime was growing, not just in a south nostalgic for British and even Marxist law and order, or in remote and poor Saada, but everywhere.

What al-Yaqoub was saying about the dysfunctional civil service reminded me of what Abdul Qadr Bajammal, Yemen’s prime minister between 2001 and 2007, had told me about really only putting in three hours work a day while in office. Other state employees I had met had similar tales to tell of chronic underemployment. A former headmaster confided to me that he had quit his job in disgust on discovering he was powerless to sack the quarter of his teaching staff who were on the payroll but had never shown their faces at the school. A tribesman acquaintance had complained to me that two of his cousins, both full-time and wealthy qat farmers, were on the army payroll but only expected to show up for training twice a year. The army, which swallowed around a sixth of Yemen’s GDP, was particularly vulnerable to corruption. In 2006 it was estimated that perhaps a third of Yemen’s armed forces were in fact ‘ghost soldiers’ like my acquaintance’s cousins, for the simple reason that the size of an officer’s budget depended on the number of soldiers under his command. Surplus ghost soldiers’ salaries could be pocketed by the officer and extra kit sold off for personal profit. The higher echelons of the army, dominated by tribesmen, were at liberty to requisition land for military use but also to sell it on for private gain, a practice that had aroused particular anger in the south,
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contributing hugely to the prevailing feeling that it had been ‘occupied’ by the north since the 1994 civil war.

Yemen’s public service wage bill was swallowing 13 per cent of the country’s GDP in 2000
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but 15 per cent of it by 2005, when the World Bank stepped in to fund a biometric ID system for employees aimed at eradicating what Salih himself estimated to be a 60,000 strong plague of ‘double-dippers’ (employees on a number of different payrolls) and ‘ghost-workers’ (employees who never appeared).
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By mid-2009, however, it was clear that little progress had been made; an EU commission had calculated that if both the army and security services were included in the purge Yemen could easily lose a grand total of 1,200,000 double-dippers and ghost-workers.
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By one estimate, there were 45,000 employees of the PSO in Sanaa alone, some of them responsible for nothing more taxing than attending qat chews and spreading the idea that without Salih at the helm, the country would be lost.
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It was equally clear that calling a halt to this thinly disguised dispensing of largesse by a kind and generous sheikh masquerading as a modern president would mean Salih agreeing to disband the biggest constituency with an obvious and solid stake in his remaining at the helm of a united Yemen. Without his vast army of idle and corrupt but solidly loyal civil servants, Salih’s credibility as an elected president and Yemen’s claim to be a democracy would look very flimsy. He would have no choice but to transform himself into a military dictator.

Judging al-Yaqoub’s mood to be sombre enough already, I forbore from asking him why Yemen was buying so many MiG-29s from Russia or why the ministry of finance was not trying to replenish the state coffers by taxing Yemen’s highest-earning product after oil: qat. With an estimated one in every seven Yemenis involved in the cultivation, distribution or sale of the plant, and 72 per cent of Yemeni men (33 per cent of Yemeni women) spending almost 10 per cent of their meagre incomes on it, surely it represented an obvious and immediate source of revenue, as alcohol or tobacco in any other country?
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A former finance minister had once informed me that although in theory there was a 10 per cent tax on qat, perhaps only 20 per cent of it was ever collected. A mere 25 million dollars of annual qat tax revenue could and should have been five times that amount, but it would not have been easy, of course. There were tales of tribesmen resisting qat taxation in much the same way as their forebears had resisted the Ottomans’ tax farmers. One attempt to set up an army checkpoint to levy the tax on qat-laden passing pick-ups had ended in chaos, with six soldiers taken hostage and their cars stolen.
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