By Mustapha Azayi

It is interestingly incredible to see how issues related to Moroccan bureaucratic and political vice often make quick lead news stories only to vanish with the same promptness they first came into sight with. Unless someone endeavors to resuscitate them and make us aware that they still remain suspended in the shadow, the fear that the core of their ills would not be tackled is likely to be seriously considered.

One of these uncontrolled issues that suffered from this ailing course lately was the Lagreamas issue.

Mane Ghachana laissa Mina (Whoever cheated us is not one of us):

Browsing through a sophisticated flow of Moroccan online news-media sites it was hard not to miss the thorny issue of transportation, fishing and mining permits known as Lagreamas.  Before it hurried away the thing hit me in the eyes in a variety of forms: Criticizing news articles and their feedbacks, excerpts of heated interviews about the issue, without of course comprising the unfavorable social gossip about this whole matter in places like cafes, homes and streets.

And ever since the freshly appointed minister of Transportation, Mr. Azziz Rabah, determined upon revealing the list of names of the Greamers (that’s what I prefer calling individuals benefiting from an infinite amount of illegally issued Lagreamas, which they plundered with cold-blooded drive) this Lagreama ownership has suddenly turned from a possession stimulating vanity into an uprubt burden causing a rapid unpleasantness in the hearts of its holders and hoarders. 

In the realm of this overwhelming, startling, Lagreamas’scandal revelation, a pristine stage of throat clearing when it comes to the struggle of fighting dishonesty and sleaze in our bled most of the concentration was on a chunk of a benefiters’entity ranging from an assortment of sportsmen elements, singers of songs while a serious portion from those fishing in high seas as well as mining in low earth remain buried in the dark. There is a claim that the list is so long and the names are so familiar to the populace that the fact of publishing the entire list of the crooks has become a subject of a mad controversy.

But some of the most frightening aspects of this revelation is that some of the people who are supposed to be fighting this unethical malfeasance are themselves part of the scoundrels’ ring.  For this reason I imagine that one might have easily downplayed the seriousness of the Lagreamas situation if only the issue were not relevant to heavy-weight scoundrels who indulged in the act of hoarding not two Lagreamas or three but up to seven or eight for some of them.

 Fkih li ntadarna barakto dkhal jamaa ba blaghtou (The Fkih whose baraka we yearned for entered the mosque with his slippers on):

The most called upon attention till now is around a so-called Fkih who was a member of the parliament and who goes with the name of Abd Bari Zemzemi.  I really tried many times to make sense of this man’s common sense but to no avail. So when it comes to this person I am quiet certain that when the field of politics brought no public eye to his stupid aspirations I suppose that he sought another way of reaching it.  So through the claim of his connoisseurship in the prescription of what I term Downers in the dark area of a branch of Fikh, called Nawazil (Calamities), in times when the bugger appears as though hooked on Uppers, like hell he managed, as if through wish-fulfillment, to stir a storm in form of a row of controversial religious Fatwas.  So it was not surprising that most of his jurist rulings ranged from authorizing marriage to underage girls, to advising women to fuck carrots, bottles and Pestles with the aim to avoid Adultery, all the way to recommending the extreme yanking of one’s penis as a remedy to sexual striving for unmarried young men (a thing which explains his crooked spine as he sits warpingly like a true Masturbationalist himself), all the way to fucking one’s wife even when she is a dead corpse, an act which is not acceptable even by the Geneva Convention standards. 

But despite the controversies of his Fatwas the Fkih has proved to his critics that he would stand his ground even if it would take him to masturbate deafly to the beats of his own drum.       

When I first took notice of this phlegmatic bastard I actually needed nobody to tell me that I was watching a sleazy rascal.  However as I kept my eyes on him I realized that some essential time is sure to be needed if I wanted to make certain that what I was fixing my eyes on at the computer was unquestionably not a fkih or a true religious savant but rather some sort of antediluvian creature taking the physical shape of a Moroccan man.  So the least assumption I came up with in trying to define this organism called Zemzemi was that of a triple fusion-mix of a fat Boa Constrictor, a Cane Toad with stuffed testicular eyes, and a Spectral Tarsier all at once. Besides this unique combination it is genuinely hard to imagine anything else to identify him with. And with the Cane Toad’s features very well-established in the mix there is then hardly any shock if you find in his cynical Fatwas some ache for necrophilian taste, for the Cane Toad species are necrophiliacs of the prestigious type. 

Still just when one thought that the odd tale of this bogus fkih has stopped at the limits of religious blabber-mouthing it was quite unpleasing and strange to discover that this weird creature also received a Lagreama. I mean for what really?

And even stranger than all of this is when you hear him moan and groan about how the Moroccan populace has picked on him solely and used him as a punching bag to vent their unbendable frustrations.  The last time I heard him whimpering was when he stated that the whole hullabaloo about Lagreamas’ permits was but a big fancy funeral that has a mouse as the deceased.  What a nice weeping from this boob called Zemzemi as he tried to distract people by generating the notion that most of us who are reproachful of him and his like are nothing but a bunch of gullible dogs barking up the wrong tree!

However it is normal for a reader to request and wonder why all this lampooning for this oddball, but to the requester I would be pleased to offer my trouble-free answer, “ The last man I would have imagined to get involved in this type of grimy Lagreamas game is a religious individual, a Fakih if one wills to say.” But no sooner had this chilling realization hit me I started to think, as naive as I am, that my judgments from now on have got to be revisited not once but twice before I go with the flow.  And this is what forced me to recall one of Bernard Shaw’s quotes, which pours in the exact vein of the topic related to religious-freakassing,  “ If you want to find the man who is weak in conduct, go to a clergyman.”

The last time I caught a glimpse of this old fart, freakass, Zemzmi, was when someone cleverly put one of his photographs, in which he appeared lost in a visible stupor of absentmindedness in what seemed to be a parliamentarian soft seat, he was wearing his notorious rockn’roll shady red glasses as if to hide some of the Downers effects on his testicular eyes.  And what made this colored contemporary photograph incredibly thought-provoking wasn’t the freakish Fkih himself, his crazy glasses, or his white djllebah but its arrangement in a juxtaposed way by the photograph of one of the iconic symbols of the fight against unfairness, treachery and evil in all its forms, the notorious Dr. Martin Luther King. 

However this comparison seemed quite offending if the aim behind it wasn’t the mere satire represented in the written words above each of the contradicting photographs.

So the far cry of I HAVE A Dream in comparison with I Have A GREAM, placed at the head of each photograph was certainly the coup de grace that explained the senselessness of this charlatan, and the message behind its unreserved contrast speaks volumes in all frankness. The message simply shows how the ideals of certain men tend to be utterly low and pompous while other’s pretty superior and humble.

However by now I know that some of the readers may believe that I tended to be harsh in my criticism of this useless fkih for he might be considered blameless in their eyes, but in order to be fair I also extend my hand of reproach to other men and women who are not Fekha, that is to say to some of the folks who are outside the religious virtuous circle as well.

One of the most concerning people outside the religious circle whom this Lagreama epidemic has soaked up entirely was the khoyi-Amelni-Manhbabek singer, Latifa Raafat.  In her reaction to the reproach of illicitly having owned a Lagreama, she has said that she got it as a gift for the sole reason that her future as a singer didn’t guarantee stability for her.  However considering the fact that this profession depends greatly on the healthy state of lungs and their sensible functioning she might be right on that point but only if she is poor and broke.  On the other hand she might be utterly wrong if her pecuniary situation is well off.  Therefore her kind of response seems to be unconvincing if one looks at the number of great artists who worked like dogs all their lives but ended dying almost impoverished.  One has only to mention the names of the two Moroccan literary giants who didn’t get their fair price or reward though they were internationally known and their works were being studied in Universities worldwide, Mohammed Zafzaf and Mohammed Shoukri are two names among the few. But never mind that for life is short and art is long. 

And then there is another type of Lagreama benefitter who belongs to the Sportive category. The principal issue with this area is that some of these gentlemen keep those Lagreamas even when they get prosperous.  And while I exclude the case of the Boxer Atik and his like who really need that kind of lagreama due to the fine fame he acquired from flattening some internationally acclaimed noses as well as raising the Moroccan flag high despite the infinite jabs his chin witnessed once upon a time. Nevertheless I would completely agree with taking away those Lagreamas from the privileged and rich sportspeople without any hesitation.

So what makes things worse in this kind of wrong recompense is when the recompensed claim that the common people decry them out of plain jealousy and detestation, but to those I would insist that they are wrong. For what is at play here is not jealousy or hatred but instead the sense of justice pursuit, a perfect process which can put a limit to one of the nastiest widespread vices that can immerse the most stable of societies into trouble if not tackled reasonably, and yes that vice is called Malicious Envy.

The feeling of envy if overlooked can lead to a horrible inferiority complex for those who deserve Lagreamas but could not get them (think about common social feeling and its impact on human nature!). I insist on envy for the fact that this human nature tends to be worse than jealousy in terms of its awful unconstructive impact: The affect that stimulates Jealousy is not necessarily the same affect that stirs Envy.  Envy, especially the Malicious one, emanates from the resentment of the fact that some folks in society have more of what they acquired illegally while others got nothing of what they deserve.

.

Thus far when it comes to the decadent deals such as offering Lagreamas to people who ought not to have them in the first place there remains only one key solution and it is to stop them utterly and immediately. This ignoble act of Lagreama stealing should end and the disrobing of the robbers should be acted upon swiftly, because the stopping of these unproductive anti-social, hyena-smiling predators, who profit unlawfully from these sort of secret arrangements would definitely help at halting the denigrating of the common Moroccan citizen in all his wholeness and the preserving of his integrity which is very vital for the present and the future of this wonderful country.

For the homogeneous Morocco of Tangier to Lagouira, which is socially now on thebrink of a progressing reasonable path, I don’t think there should be the slightest room left for this kind of mischief, for at least in my point of view it is already becoming archaic to start witnessing this degrading sort of monkey-business still taking place around in a society so politically-conscious as the Moroccan one.  I believe that no Moroccan should appear, from now on, to be allowed to feel that he is more patriotic than another Moroccan. 

However when I tried to look around for a lively example from which I believed our Moroccan government back home could seriously learn a lesson from, I couldn’t find a better case than that of the New York Subway Hero, Wesley Autrey. It is he who jumped in front of a speeding train to save a stranger from being run over and getting smashed.  The story of this man was not only humanistic and heroic in essence but also patriotic in my point of view.  And while his rise to prominence overnight was deservedly proper and not surprising, one of the remarkable things that caught my attention was that the Subway Hero didn’t receive his recompense from the Government’s coffer, instead he obtained all his gifts from private sources and private citizens:  Donald Trump offered him a check of $10 000 immediately, Chrysler offered him a fancy Jeep, His two daughters were offered a college scholarship and so on.  And there was even a private citizen on the street that offered him a 10 Dollar bill just to show his appreciation. But in the end there was no hint of Lagreama or something matching it as an income source given to this man, not even a small Lagreama from New York to New Jersey, absolutely Nada. 

Therefore in the same parallel that the Wesley Autrey accomplishment was rewarded, our dear Moroccan government, to which we wish only the best, should follow the same kind of example in rewarding its accomplishers. So there should be no special rules applied for some while alienating others from them.  And since this occasion offered itself to me I would like to go far back in history and borrow an excerpt from the work of Seneca [5BC-AD65] in which he elaborated on questions relevant to inequality and prejudice against servants of the same state.  So In one passage on page 78 of his great work On The Shortness Of Life, Seneca wrote the following under the title On Tranquility Of Life:

Service to the state is not restricted to the man who produces candidates for office, defends people in court, and votes for peace and war:  the man who teaches the young, who instills virtue into their minds (and we have a great shortage of good teachers), who grips and restrains those who are rushing madly after wealth and luxury, and if nothing more at least delays them- he too is doing a public service, though in private life.

Conclusion:

Now that is what I would call impressive patriotism.  As for the gross-fatwas-issuing- fkih Zemzemi, I think it would be compelling and also helpful if someone puts him in a metallic cage and sets him up for a serious Masturbathon against the masturbating addict) Bonobo. Only when this gloomy bastard wins over the ape in this Masturbathon could he demonstrate to us all that he is really up to what he claims to know best, the JURISPRUDENCE known as NAWAZIL(Calamities).

Kamal El Hassini (image from the archive of http://hcwu.297m.com)

According to several sources, a young unemployed graduate died in the evening of October 27, after he has been assaulted by unknown persons.

The same sources testify that the victim’s name is Kamal El Hassini and he is a member of the February 20 Movement based in the city of Elhouceima and a member of the local office of the National Assembly of Unemployed Graduates in Morocco (known in Morocco as ACDM: l’Association Nationale des Diplômés Chômeurs du Maroc.

Sources from within February 20 Movement have confirmed that Kamal El Hassini was knifed to death by some thugs or BALTAJIS, which is a term used by protest movements in Morocco to refer to people forcibly drafted by local authorities to oppose the protesters and confuse them. The victim, according to the same sources, gasped out his last breath in the way to the emergency.

On the other hand, the Moroccan official news agency MAP has reported that elements from the royal gendarmerie in the village of Beni Bouayach have arrested the person who was behind the killing of Kamal El Hassini with his murder weapon with him and put him under custody, waiting to be brought to justice on Saturday.

It should be noted that the February 20 Movement has been voicing out its worry about the risk of physical assault that surrounds its members particularly from people utilized by local authorities. While this is not the first time that such people attack the movement publicly in the streets, it is the first time that the baltajis killed someone from the movement.

Najib Chaouki, an activist in the February 20 Movement, told Aljazeera that this murder came in the context of the sues and investigations conducted by the authorities these days with a number of activists in the Feb 20 Movement in cities like Rabat, Tangier and Casablanca and that this is happening in the broader sense of the coming legislative elections that will take place on November 25, and which the movement called to boycott.