Resilience is not a policy

This summer, despite suffering violent aggressions, Lebanon did what it always does.
In April, bombs fell quiet in the capital, the diaspora came home, arrivals leapt within
weeks and by July property deals reached their highest monthly level of the year. We are
told, once more, that the Lebanese are resilient. We are. But reading this issue, I am
struck by how much of it is private substitution for a state that has stopped showing up.
Look at the evidence. Solar panels supply 15 percent of the country’s electricity
and generators supply over 50 percent. Privately. An industrial agriculture company
in the Bekaa runs entirely on its own power and builds its own fuel station. A popular
juice producer and exporter operating in the south shut for two and a half months this
year and kept paying its bills. Small firms absorb the costs of building institutional resilience, burdening themselves with a role that should be filled by the state. Lebanese
engineers lead AI companies abroad while Lebanon ranks 117th of 135 countries on AI
governance and is in desperate search of fundamental AI laws and a budget for the digital strategy created by its emergent Ministry of Technology and Artificial Intelligence.
We are, as one municipality president put it, AI-capable but not AI-ready.
The pattern repeats everywhere. Ten years after a national garbage emergency, we
finally have a law letting municipalities run their own collection, and a new waste authority. The latter, with no published budget. Our tourism ministry’s events page is still
dated August 2024. A $100,000 housing loan buys 16 square meters in Downtown
Beirut. The World Bank expects the economy to shrink 6.4 percent this year. Four in
five households struggle to afford necessities.
None of this is new, which is precisely the problem. The private sector has learned to
live without the state. The state has learned that it can let it. The arrangement is expensive,
exhausting and, as the spring war reminded us, collapses the moment the bombing starts.
Our negotiators in Washington are asking the world to trust in the Lebanese state
and invest in our people. Fair enough. But the case for public trust must first be made
at home. The government cannot yet disarm anyone, but it should and indeed can run
an airport, can and should record and publish data and budgets. Technically, the state
can supply electricity, and support and regulate any municipality that wants to collect
their own trash. Small, visible, accountable wins are where a, albeit underfunded, state
does its job. These wins are what credibility is made of.
Resilience kept us alive. It will not build a country. Let us train a state that does
its share.