Khaberni - Dr. Zaid Ahmed Al-Muhaisen wrote:
With every winter, it’s not the rain that surprises us, but the reality of municipalities in Jordan, a reality that unveils during the first low pressure system as if the rain came to pull back a curtain of complacency and reveal what was hidden. Winter is not a disaster and floods are not unforeseen events; what we experience every year is not inevitable fate, but the result of prolonged neglect, administrative laxity, and the absence of preventative action.
Rain does not create crises, but exposes them, revealing the fragility of a municipal system used to reacting rather than acting, and media showmanship instead of fieldwork. The same scenes repeat: one bulldozer working, and several employees standing with their hands in their pockets, watching, waiting to be filmed, and chatting, while streets flood, sewers overflow, and citizens pay the price. As if the problem can be solved by statements and live broadcasts, although municipalities cannot be managed by media, but by work, and can only be judged by citizens, the only true judges.
The real question is not why the streets flooded, but where were the municipalities before it began to rain? Where was the prior cleaning of sewers? Where was the routine maintenance of culverts and stormwater channels? Where were technical checks before the winter? Where were the primed submersible pumps? Where were the emergency rooms that move beyond paperwork to action? Is it sensible that manholes are opened with a broomstick? Is this a lack of tools or a lack of management? Reality shows that the malaise is a mix of clear neglect and deeper administrative decay; neglect when maintenance is postponed until disaster strikes, and decay when plans exist without execution, surveillance is absent, and accountability postponed, in an inflated, yet ineffectively impactful system, with untrained employees, absent officials, and field workers without guidance.
And while funds may be scarce, it is not a sufficient excuse, because poor management wastes as much as it squanders abundance. Citizens are not asking for the impossible, they don’t ask to stop the rain, but for a street that doesn’t turn into a river, a manhole that doesn’t become a trap, and a municipality that works before the crisis, not after.
The way to the solution is neither complicated nor theoretical: proactive rather than reactive work, routine maintenance according to mandatory schedules, genuine readiness for emergencies, restructuring to reduce slack and increase efficiency, fair surveillance and accountability, involvement of the local community in monitoring, and assessing performance by what happens on the ground rather than by the number of statements. Winter is not the enemy of the municipalities, but their honest mirror, and unless we face this mirror with boldness and authenticity, we will continue repeating the same scene every year: rain, chaos, justification, and then forgetfulness... until it rains again and the fig leaf falls once more.
