One of the weird cases came out in which a man had two wives – in which one is young, and one is older, and his young woman named Hana and an older woman named Mana.
Whenever he entered Hana’s room, she grabbed his beard and pulled out his all-white hair, saying, “It is hard for me to see you in grey hairs. It invades this beautiful black beard while you are still young.”
However, whenever he enters her older wife, she quickly plucks a black hair from his beard and says, “It displeases me to see black hair in your beard, as you are an old man of great destiny.”
The man suffered this for some time until he looked in the mirror and saw that his beard had been plucked out randomly and seemed uneven. It was then that he said, “Between Hana and Mana, beards are lost.”
This phrase refers to retirees who are caught between the “Hana” of the parliamentary committee, which seeks to buy its electoral balance from these people’s pockets, and the “Mana” of the government agency, which boasted of “big profits” achieved by the social security institution, but “blushed” and fell down when orders came from His Highness the Crown Prince to pay the profits to the retirees.
They dragged this matter to the National Assembly in an extraordinary session, in which the Minister of Finance Abdul Wahab Al-Rasheed exposed the truth by saying that “the social security is suffering in this and mainly with an actuarial deficit of about KD 24 billion. If we try to resolve this issue by raising the retirement age, we will not be able to pay the grant, as the matter is interconnected with each other.”
There is no doubt in this that the retirees feel that they are the primary victims in this to the populism that the government and the parliament began to practice alike, as if the former were competing with the latter to win the electorate’s votes, forgetting its responsibility of running the country.
The government must open up the political leadership with everything big and small, and not fool with an issue of this kind that concerns a large segment of citizens who are grieving daily with the fire of the need to pay liabilities that they have from a salary that is eroding as a result of the global inflation that casts its shadow on Kuwait, while the responsible entity has no solution to this issue.