A street in Casablanca, part of what the French designated the "useful" Morocco.
“If you think this is Morocco, you know nothing,” a neighbourhood drifter yelled in the old medina of Marrakech, as he pointed at a fancy car.
“There are Moroccans you’ve never seen, they speak a language you won’t understand, and have a way of life you can’t even imagine. They live behind the sun, in a Morocco you’ve never known,” he rattled on.
Hyperbolic as it is, his statement still serves as an apt portrayal of one of Morocco’s most serious problems: the country’s centre of power is out of step with the regions it governs.
While many Moroccans are happy to live in the kingdom’s big cities, which benefit from the attention of the central government, those in the regions – in the north-east and the south, for instance – are barely keeping their heads above water.
The root of this problem goes back to the colonial period. In the first half of the 20th century, the map of the country was divided into two sections by French colonisers – the “useful” and the “useless” Morocco – the “useful” part of the country was fertile, rich in fisheries and minerals, thus worthy of development. The “useless” was not.
French strategists, more interested in exploitation than in the country’s long-term growth, saw no reason to build infrastructure linking deprived areas to the rest of the Moorish kingdom. Since gaining independence from France in 1956, this so-called “useless” Morocco remains underdeveloped and secondary.
“There were real tensions over power between the monarchy and the nationalist movement – the country’s political and economic elite – after Morocco’s independence,” said Mustapha Qadery, a historical anthropology scholar and author of A Nationalism of Self-Contempt, a book on Moroccan politics recently published in Arabic and French.
“But there was one thing both sides agreed on: the centralisation of power was key to ensure control over the state after the French had left. So they adopted the French model, which was based on the idea that ‘there is the capital, and there is the rest’. Never mind that it was the worst government model in Europe,” Qadery noted, speaking on the phone from Virginia State University, where he is currently a scholar in residence.
Predictably, regional affairs could not be properly run from Rabat, the capital. Though the country is not massive, at best, officials did not fully understand the true needs of rural communities and, at worst, did not care about them. This was at a historical juncture where the idea of local government was made to sound like a threat to national integrity.
“Whoever called for regionalism at that critical transitional period was portrayed as a separatist by the nationalist movement, the only class in Moroccan society that thrived under the French protectorate, and wanted to make sure it’ll keep on thriving after France was gone,” Qadery said.
Populations miles away from the centre saw that walis (provincial governors) were not fitting representatives of their interests, given they were not elected and, perhaps worse, were often foreign to the region they were appointed to serve.
A few exceptions aside, underprivileged regions remained so. And since the underdevelopment of a region entails the underdevelopment of a community, this chronic aversion to decentralised power has left large local populations with no proper education, health care or human development opportunities – the “forgotten Morocco” some like to call it.
So when the country’s constitutional reforms were announced by King Mohammed VI last month, amid justified international media attention, many people in these marginal areas (where illiteracy is endemic) had no clue as to what the fuss was all about. The irony is that, for the first time, a draft constitution in Morocco addressed their situation without too much equivocation.
It reserved a whole section for “regionalism”, a system that “hinges on the principles of independent management” and “ensures the involvement of the concerned communities in running their own affairs”, to quote Article 136 of the draft text
