Beirut petrol station fatalities point to a system that is dying

Last year, I hailed a London taxi to take me to Heathrow. "Right you are young man," replied the cheery taxi driver, who was clearly "old-school", a no-nonsense Essex cabbie, complete with flat cap and scarf.

He must have seen me chuckle because he asked what was so funny. I confessed that it does not matter how old you are, someone older will always look at you as a young man.

"How old are you then" he said peering in his rear-view mirror. I told him I was 45. "It's a good age," he replied. "You know enough." I sat back as we headed out of London and I thought to myself, yes, he's right, I don't know it all, but I know enough.

I know enough to not expect much from the new Lebanese cabinet that was formed on Monday after five painful months of deliberation.

I also know enough to be legitimately disappointed by the reappointment of the Free Patriotic Movement's Gebran Bassil as minister for energy and water.

I don't know Mr Bassil and have never met him. He is the son-in-law of his party's boss, Michel Aoun, who after 15 years' political exile in France, returned in the wake of the Cedar Revolution to lead his party and win the highest number of Christian seats in parliament.

But let us put suggestions of nepotism aside because for all I know Mr Bassil may be a thoroughly competent man.

Indeed, many talk of his tenure as minister of telecoms in glowing terms. There is no denying that he reduced mobile phone tariffs which, given our exorbitant rates, can't be a bad thing.

What worries me is that Mr Bassil, and again the system rather than the man is more likely to be at fault, for the past two years has run a ministry that sat back and did nothing when it was apparently common knowledge that more than half the petrol stations in Lebanon were not licensed to operate.

Big deal you might say, but the devil is always in the detail and the issue exploded, literally, into the news last week when seven people died at a Beirut petrol station after welding work on an oil tank went badly wrong.

The Lebanese are divided into two groups when it comes to health and safety: those who are cheerfully indifferent to the catalogue of dangerous practices that occur daily up and down the country (including smoking at the pumps) and those who accept a degree of risk that shadows them every day, including when filling up their car.

Customers at the Wardieh station in East Beirut who stopped to fill up on the night of June 6 ran out of luck.

In the brouhaha that followed, Mr Bassil, whose ministry is responsible for issuing petrol station licences, said he had called for action to be taken on the matter in February last year and blamed parliament's energy committee for doing nothing.

"What happened is like a warning alarm," Mr Bassil told the local media, no doubt with a sense of genuine conviction. "This was actually an accident in a legal gas station. It is not yet clear if they were implementing proper safety measures, but the situation could be far worse in illegal stations."

So Mr Bassil knew many of the nation's patrol stations were operating illegally and he did nothing except blame the parliamentary committee?

His ministry had a year to assess the potential danger facing the public and yet it did nothing.

You might say that I am making a proverbial mountain out of a molehill, that this is simply part and parcel of the non-western experience, that we can never really, whatever Lebanon's delusions of grandeur, instil a European rigour into its pliant Mediterranean culture and that in any case it was the first time the country has had a major accident like this in more than a decade, so what's the big deal in the greater scheme of things?

In the past I might have shut up and swallowed the dollop of realism. But, like the cab driver said, I know enough.

Enough to see that the country is rotten to the core, that any talk of foreign investment and reviving the economy can never happen unless it stops playing fast and loose with people's lives.

It is a situation we face on our roads and in the workplace every day. In short, Lebanon is an accident waiting to happen.

Mr Bassil might argue that he is being unfairly picked on. That he is no worse than the rest.

Indeed, he might even make a good case for being more competent than many of his colleagues, but all I know is that his reappointment indicates no one gives a damn, neither about the four people who died last week, nor an unresolved major safety issue.

That there has been zero ministerial accountability is a scandal and speaks volumes about the priorities of our so-called political class.

That much I do know.

Michael Karam is a communications and publishing consultant based in Beirut