The circle of official neglect of the southern Nabatieh Governorate is expanding to unexpected places, as if what it has suffered from the injustice of the absence of the state historically, in addition to the war that has been going on for more than two years, is not enough to make the official authorities pay attention to the conditions of this region, and try to compensate it with the minimum of attention.
What’s new in this regard is that some government departments in the governorate’s capital, Nabatieh, have begun to experience institutional vacuums and vacancies in several sensitive positions due to administrative bureaucracy and the near-paralysis that has restricted the role of the Civil Service Council since 2017. This has negatively impacted the management of employee affairs and delayed the completion of their administrative transactions, adding to the tragedy they are enduring as a result of the war and ongoing Israeli attacks, the hardship of traveling between regions to obtain the services they are entitled to.
It is well known that state administrations were late in reaching the governorates of South Lebanon and Nabatieh, and what arrived after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000 did not fill the void of the state’s chronic absence and its irresponsible marginalization of the peripheral regions. There is no need here to go back to criticizing administrative centralization and its disadvantages, in terms of its inability to meet the necessary needs or respond quickly to the needs of the regions, as the matter has gone beyond all of this, and surpassed it, as a unique administrative crisis has been escalating for two years in the Nabatieh Governorate, which is the vacancy of four positions in the State Employees Cooperative Center, which are supposed to be occupied by two doctors and two pharmacists.
The crisis is linked to both the employment mechanism and the war, says Salam Badr Al-Din, a member of the “Independent Trade Union Movement” in Nabatieh: “The cooperative centers across Lebanon have begun to empty out one after another. There is a situation similar to Nabatieh in Halba, Zahle, and Baalbek… In Nabatieh, the crisis is two years old, it started with the war and continues because of the employment mechanisms.”
While one of the affected employees points out that the issue was raised with the governor of Nabatieh, Houda Turk, and reached the region’s representatives, the official authorities insist that there is no solution, and claim that the employment is illegal because it should go through the Civil Service Council.
In this regard, Badr al-Din explains that “the decision to halt recruitment was made in 2017 and will end at the end of 2025.” But will the crisis end at the beginning of 2026? Badr al-Din doubts it, saying, “The administrative procedures take a long time, such as announcing exams, administering them, sorting names and vacancies, and then starting recruitment. This requires at least a year, knowing that even the Civil Service Council needs restructuring before it can resume its work.” She warns against “the situation remaining as it is at the Nabatieh center. The Sidon center, which we resorted to, will be vacant within two months, and we will be forced to go to the main center in Beirut. Imagine an employee who lives in the remote areas of Bint Jbeil or Hasbaya; he will have to travel for three hours or more to complete an administrative transaction. Sometimes the patient is alone, unable to move around, and doesn’t own a car. His financial situation is so difficult that the trip to Sidon or Beirut becomes a significant financial burden. This is in addition to the worries of the war and the ongoing airstrikes on the roads.” There is a distinction between civilian and military personnel; what do we do in this case?
Badr Al-Din confirms that “the solution is either through assignment, contracting, or secondment. Seconded doctors are essentially state employees, and they are usually seconded once or twice a week to their centers, even though they are supposed to be present daily.” This means that there is an administrative solution, but there is no will.
In fact, the work of the Lebanese Civil Service Council has been partially disrupted since 2017, which has placed the public administration and the public sector in the face of major challenges, including a very high rate of job vacancies, which has led to a deterioration of services. However, the Civil Service Council can still exercise its legal powers related to the appointment of employees through the secondment mechanism.
Since its establishment in 1959, the Civil Service Council has been the official body responsible for finding civil service employees and filling it with human resources, while ensuring the application of an employment mechanism based on competence through conducting examinations and distributing successful candidates to ministries in two rounds within one year. However, over time it lost its role, firstly by being subject to the whims of political parties, and secondly by sectarianizing employment, so that sectarian affiliation and favoritism became the criteria instead of competence and merit, and consequently it lost its ability to complete employment processes in ministries.
Furthermore, the Civil Service Council has not updated its recruitment and testing mechanisms since the 1990s, and it fundamentally lacks flexibility in filling vacancies, as evidenced by the situation of the Nabatieh Employees’ Cooperative. Moreover, the current vacancies, coupled with a surplus of contract workers and employees, indicate, in a way, that administrative reform is being obstructed by parties that benefit from the state’s absence, which is the foundation of its sovereignty and political independence.
Political parties in Lebanon have always exploited state institutions to strengthen their power and expand their popular base. They restricted access to public service and employment to those affiliated with them, and their leaders used sectarian constraints to seize jobs and distribute them exclusively to their loyalists. Nepotism replaced competence, the party replaced the state, and sectarianism replaced merit, leading to the collapse of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
In the south today, state institutions are increasingly collapsing, a near-total collapse in the areas south of the river, and a partial collapse in the areas north of the river. This is fatally damaging public services and simultaneously increasing the citizen’s dependence on the political leader and his distance from the state, which poses a direct threat to the social contract.
The state might succeed in restoring the social contract with the southern citizen, if it thought outside the box just once, and took the initiative to return to the south through the job vacancies, and jumped over the administrative obstacles that restrict employment, and devised an emergency law specific to the state of war that ends with its end, and why not start with the state employees’ cooperative in Nabatieh?
The time and circumstances do not allow for following routine employment mechanisms, and serving the citizen is above all constitutions and laws, and as they say, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
In the 1950s, President Fouad Chehab made strenuous efforts to build non-sectarian civil institutions, but the parties quickly hijacked them and dragged them into the sectarian fold, as the opposite of the concept of the state and similar to the concept of a farm. Perhaps George Orwell, in his book “Animal Farm,” pointed to the takeover of power by the corrupt, which turns the state into a farm and the citizens into subjects, so the concept of citizenship disappears.
What is the role of a modern, democratically elected state and its institutions other than to properly manage people’s affairs? It should be noted that the Nabatieh Governorate, which is divided into three districts south of the river (Marjeyoun, Hasbaya, and Bint Jbeil) and one north of the river (Nabatieh District), does not have a government hospital that is adequate for the emergency situation that has arisen in the last two years. The medical and health teams there have been working since the first day of the war without official support, while the representatives of the four districts are absent, preoccupied with political squabbles, leaving the issue of development to divine miracles!
In conclusion, can it be said that the new government has failed to achieve its two main slogans: the state’s monopoly on weapons and administrative reform? It seems to have failed, at least in the south, to implement them. The security collapse in the southern regions will inevitably be followed by a collapse of the healthcare system, and the vacuum in administrative offices that reflect the state’s presence will exacerbate the state’s own collapse. The southern employee who served the state and contributed a monthly sum from his salary to secure his continued employment is now having his dignity trampled on the roads, sometimes out of fear of security forces, and other times while running from Nabatieh to Sidon to Beirut to process paperwork… If the state is aware of this and turning a blind eye, the calamity is immense; if it is unaware, the calamity is even greater…