Akram Al-Humayri
Amidst the complexities that the Yemeni landscape has witnessed in recent years, and their direct impact on the level of services provided to citizens in Yemen as a whole, and in Taiz Governorate in particular, we still believe that the scale of efforts made at all levels is still below what is desired and expected.
The local authority in Taiz Governorate, up to this moment, can be said to be working hard to improve the level of public services provided to citizens, despite all the obstacles facing its work. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the inability of the local authorities in the governorate to pass a number of agreements or market self-financing project studies due to the complexities existing in the laws that regulate their work.
I have reviewed the draft report on community resilience in Taiz Governorate for the year 2022, issued by the Youth Without Borders organization in cooperation with a number of local organizations in the governorate and youth initiatives, and I was not at all surprised by the ratios mentioned in it, but I will discuss in this article one problem as a case study to clarify why the local authorities are unable to improve the level of public services in the governorate.
The problem lies in the issue of public electricity, with 80% of the participants in the research saying that they do not have it even through commercial energy companies. Until now, despite all the attempts made by the local authority to solve this problem, it is still unable to unravel the codes of the solution. The local authority is not entitled to sign power purchase contracts, like the rest of the governorates, as this matter is dealt with by the Supreme Energy Committee in the temporary capital, Aden. Despite the local authority's attempts to communicate with the companies working in the field of power purchase, their efforts are halted by the bureaucracy of the administrative work of the central authorities.
The Electricity Corporation has attempted to conduct studies for maintenance projects for the Asayfira power plant, but it is completely incapable of financing or marketing this study to international organizations, because the donor international organizations "do not purchase state assets", and this matter is not understood, to whom will the international organizations direct the funds they have collected in the name of Yemen and serving the Yemenis.
In the end, I find that the recommendations that emerged from the study are highly logical, and foremost among them is the emphasis on the need to raise the level of coordination between the local authorities in the governorate and the central authority in the capital Aden, and also to work on creating real frameworks that enable the community to benefit from the funding that is accumulating in the coffers of international organizations without directing them to serve the community and improve public services for citizens as required, based on the actual need, and not the studies that meet the tendencies of the donors.
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