Rage Against the Sectarian Machine
On Thursday 17 October, the Lebanese government proposed a new tax of 0.20 USD per day (£4.60 a month) on Voice Over Internet Protocol (#VOIP) calls, affecting mostly WhatsApp calls. In a country paying highly for a chronically inadequate and under-invested telecommunication infrastructure, this was not a good move. According to a McKinsey report in January 2019, Lebanon has the 130th slowest internet out of 133 countries. In other words, Lebanon – a country where, officially, war finished in 1990 – has slower internet than a war zone. Moreover, according to the same report, mobile data and voice prices are two or three times higher than regional peers, making it one of the least affordable in the region.
The “Whatsapp tax”, however, is only a detail in a much wider Lebanese landscape, where public infrastructure and the natural resources that partly sustain it are crumbling under inadequate or absent policies, corruption, and environmental and real estate abuse within a voracious neoliberal market logic. Examples of this process include the privatisation of much of the country’s coastline, the illegal quarrying of mountains to nurture the real estate boom, especially after the end of the 1975-1990 civil war (resulting in higher risk of mudslides and flash floods), patchy planning and zoning practices (Bou Akar 2018) , mismanagement of waste services that grew into a nationwide crisis in 2015 and, finally, wild fires that, in the three days preceding the ‘#Whatsapp_Tax’ idea, wiped out 1,200 hectares (2,965 acres) of forest, according to expert George Mitri. The fires spread amidst state inertia: three crowdfunded firefighting helicopters sat idle and in disrepair, with the lack of fire rangers due to the stall in appointments the previous year.
▻https://urbanviolence.org/rage-against-the-sectarian-machine
#Liban #taxe