THE Civil Defense recently announced a list of missing persons in the Jeddah flood disaster. Most of the missing are children. The problem of missing persons is a big one and no doubt their families are experiencing a difficult time. However, the list of those missing went missing amid the ongoing discussions about the cause of the disaster. The list is worth additional attention from both the media and the public. Volunteers should be called in to join the search for the missing persons.
There is, you will be interested to learn about, a group of people, who have been missing for a long time. The disaster made all citizens and residents feel their absence. Maybe the tragedy presents an opportunity for us to look for them. The first of the groups missing are the members of the Shoura Council who should have been at the center of the disaster.
Then there are the public-monitoring institutions that have been absent since the first day of the tragedy. The list also includes establishments and institutions concerned with environmental protection.
However, the worst absence was that of the (half-elected) municipal councils which were not given the full opportunity to perform their duties. This absence that has been discussed on previous occasions has become a pressing national question in the wake of the recent natural disaster. This is so because the series of mistakes that have become apparent in Jeddah because of the floods wrecked havoc in other places too.
The problems relating to residential land, sewage, drainage and roads are not restricted to Jeddah alone. They are problems with complicated dimensions in which the duties of the judiciary, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and the Civil Defense overlap. The only bodies authorized to follow up municipal affairs with all these parties are the municipal councils.
The absence of action by the municipal council in any city would make government departments carry on their duties without coordination; this inevitably produces errors. When there is a big disaster, any party will blame the other party for mistakes.
It is imperative that we learn from the tragedy of the floods in order to activate the role of the municipal councils and push them to do their jobs instead of their members spending long hours of leisure criticizing the Eid Al-Adha celebrations.
