Watan's Destination: The Real Encroachments on State Properties
The campaign launched by the Kuwait Municipality, known as the removal of encroachments on state property, which focused on private residences—particularly those related to agriculture, home awnings, and outdoor diwaniyas—and received extensive media coverage, especially from Kuwait Television by opening nine screens for live broadcasts as if it were the launch of a Kuwaiti space shuttle, demonstrates the limited capacity of the General Administration to enforce the law and the lack of prioritization in addressing actual violations on state property.
Most people utilize the setbacks next to their homes not for commercial activities on state land, but for decorative gardening, installing awnings to reduce intense heat, or as outdoor diwaniyas located in areas that pose no problem for the neighborhood or neighbors. In any case, the harm caused by any violation on private housing is but a drop in the ocean of damages resulting from and accumulated through encroachments on industrial, commercial, and craft state properties.
If I were to offer advice to the government executive body regarding the removal of encroachments on state property, I would recommend the obvious, which requires no genius or brilliance: starting with the removal of the largest and most harmful violations, down to the smallest. By this, I mean not only obvious encroachments on state property, such as exceeding specified areas or exploiting land for purposes other than those for which the government plot was granted, but also confronting the largest ignored violation in Kuwait: the chain of sublease contracts on state property.
The negative consequences of sublease contracts do not stop at the misuse of government lands for purposes other than the service, industrial, or other market and economy needs intended by the state. They extend to creating inflationary pressures on consumers and increasing costs and expenses for the actual operator. Moreover, the damages of sublease contracts on state property reach the labor market, as they are one of the factors discouraging many Kuwaiti youth from engaging in self-employment.
It would have been more appropriate for the executive administration in many state institutions to begin addressing these violations, thereby distinguishing the actual operator—whether industrial, service, craft, etc.—from the chain of traders dealing in sublease contracts on state property.
Unfortunately, in Kuwait, one can find public support for any symbolic measure, such as removing residential violations, even if the government action yields no clear benefit. Meanwhile, the more urgent and deeply damaging violations do not constitute any real priority in the decision-making hierarchy of the executive administration.
