‘he’ graduated as a man of religion 30 years ago at a university in qassim. he obtained his higher degrees from similar universities, then he worked at the kuwait university as a teacher of sharia, then at the ministry of awqaf and islamic affairs, head of the sharia institutions of a number of investment companies which encountered difficult financial problems with which he had nothing to do. this is a summary of a wellknown personality biography, an important aspect of thinking about handing over a post. we do not doubt the biography of the man and his integrity, and the fact that he hails from a good family, but this biography itself required the intervention of three egyptians historians to write a book about him and the following is an extract from one of the pages: ‘the master had a daily program throughout the week, almost unchanged (we do not know whether the program is still going on or not), he goes out of his house to the mosque early in summer for the morning prayer, then comes back to rest at home and does not sleep after dawn in winter. ‘then he has breakfast at home at 8 am, and he drives to his office where an office boy makes coffee for him, which is more than five times a day, each time he enters the office or goes to his diwan or whenever he has a visitor which is on sunday, monday and tuesday in the council of fatwas and then lectures in the college on monday and wednesday, which is in the afternoon, and on wednesday and thursday he stays put in his office.’ we are not concerned with the importance of mentioning these details in a personal biography that is not different from us in its modest daily activity, which did not require three men to write it, but there may be more bright aspects we did not know about or touched by the three historians. do you notice that!!? this is not an underestimation of this man and his biography, which we have no doubt that it is good and flawless, but it is not unique in a manner that the government gives him the highest positions, knowing that three men who wrote his biography in a book from which we quoted a page was issued before he took his last position. this shows that neither the government nor the one who selected him in the position reads, add to this the absence of any logical or scientific mechanism in the selection of those who take up senior positions. this leads us to the subject of our article on how to choose. it is clear that the mechanism is completely missing. there are no interviews in the national assembly for candidates to high security positions, or in charge of managing half a trillion dollars, for example, to test their viability for the post. there is no information center that can be used to select candidates. there are no actual exams for those who are selected for senior positions. many of those who hold the highest academic degrees, and graduated from america and europe, have neither mastered nor are fluent in english or even the language of the country in which they studied. when there is an advertisement for a vacant position of a director in the oil, aviation or foreign investment sectors, one of the conditions is the applicants should be proficient in english to ascertain the validity of claims of applicants. all this shows that there is a defect in the selection process for people in higher positions. after kuwait ‘developed’, selection became random and based on origins of families or relatives. ‘this is our son’, ‘this is our cousin’ has become the criteria for selections.