By Nadeem El Zahr | Opinions Junior Editor

Throughout its long and troublesome history, Lebanon has been likened to many rather unflattering things: A banana republic, a jungle, an arbitrary clump of fearful people sharing a limited space, among countless other things. While it may be all these things and none of them at the same time – each of the aforementioned analogies have one attribute in common: They are places in which there is complete lack of security. 

Security in what sense?

Well, in each and every one imaginable. There is nothing in Lebanon today that exudes a feeling of security to the average citizen, and such has been the case for as long as our collective memory can stretch back. Physical security is virtually non-existent; social and economic security is out of the question. This makeup has remained relatively unchanged since even before the civil war. The absence of the most basic prerequisites for life has been a headline of citizenship in Lebanon, and it is in that sense that security is downright unattainable to the average citizen. 

However, what had been the cause of this insecurity during the civil war is not the same today. While it may have been battles, checkpoints, and massacres that were the foremost threat to security during the civil war, today, it is the absence of a guarantee for food, shelter, fuel, and other basic civil rights. However, the antidote to this insecurity has remained the same. Just like our parents may have befriended some politically involved individuals during the war to facilitate their lives and provide some sense of security, our generation does the exact same. Need gas? Call this number and tell them “X” sent you. Have some official paperwork to do? Call this number and tell him “Y” said to take care of me. This is usually done between members of the same sect or political affiliation, and is explicitly perpetuated by the formula of sectarian partition of the state and its institutions that, ironically, was intended to soothe the sects’ competition for political representation and influence that had culminated in 15 years of civil strife. Thus, we end up with the Hegelian dialectic we have today, whereby the same entities that created the problem provided the (unsustainable) solution. Knowing this, the Latin saying “cura te ipsum”, cure yourself, rings much closer to home.

How does this affect the citizenry and their relationship with the state? 

Simply put, it introduces, nay, imposes upon the citizenry an impalpable system of transactions with, and dependency on, sectarian political parties – maintained only on the condition that one grants their undying allegiance and appreciation to their corresponding sectarian leaders come election season. 

This is clientelism manifested, a transactional political system whereby the citizenry is reduced to identifying with their political affiliation and sectarian identity in exchange for their most basic rights, even if they do not necessarily subscribe to either of those two. Essentially, your rights become the commodity, and your vote the currency with which you pay to receive them. Thus, the citizenry’s understanding of the philosophical fundamentals of national identity, citizenship, state legitimacy, and sovereignty all but disintegrates. 

How, then, can the Lebanese citizen ensure his or her rights and security if not for the institutions of government and law enforcement? 

If you, dear reader, have ever called in a favor from a connected individual, paid bribes, and/or were compelled to use some politically “heavy” name to receive your basic necessities from healthcare to education and gasoline to sustenance, then you are already very familiar with how. Citizens become reduced to their political allegiances and sectarian identities, neither of which they choose for themselves. 

Try it. 

Next time you enter a governmental institution, be it a ministry, or a municipality, see how long it takes you to complete your paperwork without some “help” from a fellow member of your family, sect, or political party, sometimes by the loosest of associations. If getting some paperwork done is this troublesome, one can only imagine what to do in case their own physical security was threatened by some unscrupulous, usually more politically connected, actors. It becomes very difficult, after dealing with all these impediments, to refrain from taking the easy route and submitting to the clientelist model to accomplish your objectives – this has been the case of the overwhelming majority of the Lebanese population since time immemorial. 

Where an impartial and secular institution of services to which the population can look to for their security should be, a façade of a state institution relying completely on the clientelist model, partitioned and transactional according to each sect and its respective political parties, unfortunately stands. It is only natural then, that after such a prolonged dysfunction within the institutions of the state, that the average citizen looks elsewhere for his or her rights, and if the only method to attain these is to submit to the whims of their corresponding sectarian chiefs, then so be it – life must go on after all, does it not?

Why not just eradicate this sectarian model and adopt a secular one based on citizenship?

Contrary to what has been circulated countless times on media outlets and engaged political circles, this transactional arrangement is not a corruption of the system in place, but is inherently the system in and of itself, and deliberately so – how else can it be possible to provide virtually no services to the population while still maintaining such a large support base and uncontested legitimacy? Clientelism is the essence of the mechanism by which the system drives itself forward, and further legitimizes the hegemony of political leaders as vanguards of sectarian rights in the face of those hell bent on annihilating “us”; or so they say. 

Being “just Lebanese” is simply not enough to survive as a citizen, one must, by design, continue their dependence on sectarian/political affiliation to merely get by. This makes it utterly impossible to enact any semblance of revolution or reform through targeting sectarianism, because that means destroying the unofficial safety nets created by the sectarian clientelist formula that has held the state together for all of recent memory with no viable alternative in sight.

Institutionalized corruption is one thing, but a system where citizenship and the rights therein are closely intertwined and dependent on sectarian identity is in a monstrous class of its own. The result is that whenever you go to get some paperwork straightened out in one governmental institution or the other, you are not a citizen until your sect’s representative “on the inside” says so – until then, enjoy the waiting room.