recently the tribes played a game. it was crystal clear that this game was ‘played’ under government auspices and represented this time by the public authority for youth and sports, on its premises with the participation of all members of the tribe, a parliamentary deputy and the president of a sports club and a referee.
the question which baffled the media is the case of the sports, why university students are prevented from using tribal lists and logos in the elections. why there are primaries since both are tribal.
there is no doubt that there are those who look for fragmentation and division. there are those who benefi t from it, and this is deliberately done by one party for certain objective by another. what happens with or within a tribe may have its equivalent within tribes, sects and others.
the electoral system in kuwait is simple and uncomplicated, characterized by direct elections, where the candidate wins the parliamentary seat by gaining a majority of votes even if these votes are less than one percent.
this can be easily achieved by relying on the votes of the tribe or sect if they illegally agree to give votes to a specific candidate during the primaries (which are punishable by law) to become the representative of the nation in the parliament and they form the largest proportion in the national assembly.
by examining the results of the 2009 elections, for example, the largest percentage of votes received by the first winner in the fourth constituency did not exceed 2 percent of the total votes in the constituency. in 2012, the first winner received 3 percent of the total votes, and the last received just over half of one percent. the winner of the last place in 2009 was less than half a percent (0.47%) of the total vote.
so, how can we claim such candidates represent the nation correctly? the election law says so, and we have to accept it as it is now.
in this sense, it is suggested that the elections be held in kuwait in two stages. in the first stage, the first 100 candidates who receive the largest number of votes will be selected, and then half of them will be elected as representatives of the entire nation in the second stage elections.
this method will eliminate some of the tribal or sectarian influence in the elections, since no candidate will be able to rely only on the votes of his tribe or his sect for a victory, but he must seek to win the votes of the rest of the people in his constituency to win a seat of the national assembly, and this is the complex type of elections.
some of them tend to vote in two stages because the current simple electoral system has contributed to the consolidation of the concept of tribalism and sectarianism, and therefore must be eliminated.
in a bid to stamp out sectarianism and racism in singapore, whose people are of chinese, malaysian and indian origin, as well as the other minorities of lesser importance, singapore’s great political and social reformer, lee kuan yew, imposed mixing minorities with each other and did allow the creation of racial or religious groups (ghettos) for any race, government apartments and houses must have people of mixed backgrounds representing all segments of society to the extent that even two groups are not concentrated in one building.
thus each category accepted the other to large extent, co-existed with it, resulted in a kind of human relationship and friendship among them, their marriage and their work with each other.
in kuwait, however, the same thing happened at the beginning of the democratic life in many areas, which we discussed in several articles, but after that, in order to break up the society, some believed that it was better to allow ethnic cleansing and give citizens the right to sell their homes which are mortgaged to the government to third parties, and exchange homes with them in different areas, and here is the emergence of areas inhabited and controlled completely by a tribe or a sect.