Watching World Cup a complex affair in Lebanon

Energy minister Arthur Nazarian should not have insulted our intelligence last week by casually prefixing a statement on the situation by saying “until we get 24-hour electricity….”, as if Lebanon was experiencing a temporary blip rather than a quarter century stain of shame on successive corrupt and inept governments.

I have known Nabil since we were kids. In fact, I once, as kids do, or at least did, threw a stone, which accidentally glanced off his head. As you can imagine, he was none too impressed and that night, probably because I felt bad, I fessed up to my mortified father, who marched me round to Nabil’s house to apologise.

It was a bad move. The next day, Nabil, who as kids do, had forgotten about the incident, told me that, instead of resolving the matter, his father later beat him for causing such a fuss.

Nabil and I still laugh about the incident and, though I doubt his late father’s belt had anything to do with it, he is a very unflappable man. Until it comes to football, that is. Once every two years, come the Fifa World Cup and European Championships, Nabil becomes rabid in his support for Germany’s national football team, and the prospect of his beloved mannschaft reaching yet another final on Sunday has left him positively foaming with excitement.

But Lebanon would not be Lebanon if there weren’t an added smidgen of anxiety in all this. You see, at the best of times, our village gets its evening power from 6pm to midnight on alternate nights. The World Cup semi-finals are scheduled to start at 11pm, so Nabil, who doesn’t have a generator, knows that unless Electricité du Liban is feeling generous, he will miss either the first or second half of the game with Brazil.

And EDL is not in a giving mood these days. The company has announced that it can no longer maintain it’s “regular” service, which in real speak is 21 hours a day in Beirut and around 10 to 15 hours a day elsewhere, depending on where you live. It needs an extra US$266 million to meet the extra demand created by the 1.5 million extra people we have welcomed from Syria and all those new homes built across the country during a rampant construction boom.

So how are we coping? Well, those who have them are making do with generators, private or communal, which of course creates an extra financial burden to end users. Generators are also hardly environmentally friendly but, more worryingly, at the communal end of the market they have become a semi-legitimate sector in their own right. (Indeed, one wonders what will happen to these now powerful cartels if and when — a very big “if” and an even bigger “when” — the country does fix its chronic power problem.

But they needn’t worry. The complacency of the state is staggering. The energy minister Arthur Nazarian, like his predecessors, is powerless to do anything meaningful, but he really shouldn’t have insulted our intelligence last week by casually prefixing a statement on the situation by saying “until we get 24-hour electricity”, as if Lebanon was experiencing a temporary blip rather than a quarter-century stain of shame on successive corrupt and inept governments.

But back to the football. I wrote that at the start of Brazil 2014 many Lebanese, my buddy Nabil included, were faced with the prospect of not being able to watch any of it, unless they signed up for a package from Sama, a local satellite provider that had the local broadcast rights.

Then, at the eleventh hour, the telecoms minister Butros Harb announced that his ministry had set aside $3 million from mobile telecom revenues to pay Sama for the right to air the games on Tele Liban, our unfashionable and underfunded state-run TV channel. It was a deal that, we thought, ensured that anyone with a TV could watch the global tournament free of charge.

But the next thing we knew was that Sama was suing TL for showing the games without permission. So what was the $3m for? It turns out, from what most of us can gather, that it was to allow Sama to distribute the rights to the many “grey” market satellite providers that serve about 75 per cent of the homes in the country.

Or looked at another way, the state used its money to perpetuate the livelihoods of what are essentially pirate operations. Talal Makdessi, a former advertising honcho and the current director general of TL, saw the insanity of the deal and is currently daring Sama to do its worst.

Meanwhile, back in the village, Nabil in his usual relaxed way has rationalised that he can’t change the madness that is Lebanon. He just wants to fire up his nightly shisha and watch a bit of football with his wife and kids. It’s not a lot to ask.

Michael Karam is a freelance journalist based in Beirut

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