While Mohammed VI celebrates its sixty years, including twenty-four years of reign on the Alaouite throne, Morocco is at an important turning point in its social history. The challenge is to rebalance its development model to provide solid foundations for the new regional power that the kingdom dreams of being in a sustainable way. And if there is an essential role to take into consideration, it is indeed that of the Cherifian sovereign in his combined qualities of Commander of the Faithful, guardian of the fundamental values of the kingdom and Head of State with the upper hand over the sectors which are the Economy, Foreign Affairs, Defense and the security system.
In these areas, Morocco has changed a lot since 1999, the year of the death of Hassan II. The country has positioned itself favorably on the world map of industrial and commercial value chains, reintegrated into the big family of the African Union, won major diplomatic successes (notably with regard to the Sahara, whose Moroccan character is now recognized by the States and Israel), strengthened its defense systems with solid and varied partnerships and demonstrated its effectiveness in terms of intelligence and actions against jihadist terrorism.
This has made it a country that now counts on the international scene. Internally, and especially socially, the music is slightly different.
Inequalities persist
The alarm rang very loudly the day after the publication of the report commissioned in 2019 by the king to develop a "New Development Model (NMD)". This had highlighted “the worsening of inequalities”, “the slowness of reforms” and a “resistance to change”. And his observation was scathing: “The wealthiest 10% of Moroccans still concentrate eleven times more wealth than the poorest 10%. “Unacceptable in a kingdom where the sovereign has such a strong social image that he is called “king of the poor”.
Despite the efforts made here and there, Morocco is ranked 123rd (out of 181) in terms of its human development index by the United Nations Development Program report published in 2022. With a life expectancy of 74 years in 2021 and a score of 0.683, which is worse than other countries in the Maghreb, Morocco is considered a country with average human development.
Despite the program of the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) launched by Mohammed VI in May 2005 "to fight against poverty, precariousness and social exclusion, the country has an illiteracy rate of around 24% in 2021 for a gross domestic product per capita of $10,460, which ranks it 125th in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) report on the outlook for 2023.
Moreover, according to the High Commission for Planning (HCP), under the effect of Covid-19 and inflation, Morocco has fallen back to the levels of poverty of 2014. And to make matters worse, as denounced by the king Mohammed VI in his 2018 Speech from the Throne, “scattered social programs” encroached “on each other”, which reduced “their coherence” and “their effectiveness”, blurring the readability of the social trajectory. More than ever, the time has therefore come for the convergence of social programs in a country where the unemployment rate remains high at 12.4% in the 2nd quarter of 2023 and where 77.3% of the active population works in the informal sector according to the World Bank. However, the country is not starting from a blank page. As proof, important concretizations can be noted.
Broader social protection driven
Indeed, since the accession of Mohammed VI to the Throne in 1999, many large-scale social programs have followed one another with the stated ambition of reducing the economic distortions induced by the forced growth imposed by the Head of State. Thus the economic achievements, mainly driven by massive investments in infrastructure, have made it possible to reduce extreme poverty and bring about the emergence of an increasingly dense middle class. Problem: this has not contributed to reducing inequalities.
This is what led the King to declare in 2020, on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of his accession to the throne, that "the time has come to launch, over the next five years, the process of generalizing social security for the benefit of all Moroccans". Enough to trigger a real "social big bang" with the extension of compulsory health insurance to 22 million new beneficiaries, the generalization of family allowances targeting 7 million children of school age, the extension of the base of members of pension schemes to 5 million people in employment, finally the generalization of compensation for job loss by 2025.
To measure the political will accompanying all these measures, the kingdom has implemented an unprecedented reform at an annual cost of 51 billion dirhams (approximately 4,7 billion euros), i.e. the equivalent of 4.25% of Moroccan GDP, knowing that the general state budget would take 23 billion dirhams (about 2.1 billion euros) from it.
Social protection put in place
Concretely, on this path of broader social protection, Morocco has thus gone from 7.8 million beneficiaries of health insurance in December 2020 to 23.2 million in April 2023. Among these new affiliates, there are 3.6 million self-employed workers and their dependents as well as 9.4 million beneficiaries of AMO-Tadamon. In fact, according to the National Health Insurance Agency (Anam), 79.8% of the Moroccan population benefited from some form of medical coverage at the end of September 2022, compared to 74.2% at the end of 2021.
The number of files submitted daily to the National Social Security Fund (CNSS) literally exploded, reaching the figure of 60,600, or 125 files per minute. Faced with this unprecedented flow, the CNSS mobilized to expand its network. This now stands at 156 branches. That said, it is not only on social protection that the kingdom has started work. There is the extremely important issue of women's rights, which Mohammed VI seized upon at the start of his reign.
Women's rights: the totem reform of 2004
Considered as one of the totem reforms of the beginning of King Mohammed VI's reign, the modernization of the status of Moroccan women in 2004 through the so-called Moudawana reform (the Family and Personal Status Code) is a step fundamental for anyone who wants to understand the new breaths that are going through Moroccan society.
This event was at the time the subject of a heated debate between conservatives and progressives drawing with precision lines of fracture around the conjugation between "tradition and modernity".
The debate reached its climax on March 12, 2000, when the two camps, each on their side, organized two gigantic demonstrations in Rabat and Casablanca, for and against the revision of the Moudawana. This resulted in a social crisis whose outcome was delivered by an arbitration of the king. In his speech of October 10, 2003, Mohammed VI introduced reforms qualified at the very least as "substantial" through eleven measures. These have made repudiation and polygamy almost impossible, while reconciling oppositions.
Twenty years later, the reform dynamic that presided over the Moudawana of 2004 is in search of a second wind. The overhaul of family law remains in fact still at the heart of the demands of Moroccan activists because of the failures in the application of some of its aspects revolving around the themes, among others, of the marriage of minors, gender equality and children's rights. They also demand a revision of the Penal Code for a society that better protects women from violence of all kinds, including domestic violence.
Minors, inheritance, children: a social revolution to complete
During his 2022 Speech from the Throne, King Mohammed VI announced Act II of the Moudawana reform. He had particularly insisted on the need to establish more equality between women and men. “When women have full access to their rights, they do no harm to men, nor do they harm themselves. In fact, the sine qua non condition for Morocco to continue to progress is that they occupy the place that falls to them and that they bring their efficient support to all development sectors", he had indicated, asking for an update of legislation dedicated to the promotion of these rights. In the process, a working group on the reform of the Moudawana was created by the National Human Rights Council (CNDH). Its main mission: draw up a memorandum providing an overall view of the said reform.
The concrete expectations of civil society
To paraphrase the collective for fundamental freedoms which has looked into the question, it is time to introduce “real amendments” and to “make effective” certain articles already present in the Family Code. On the question of inheritance, a reform of the current laws is strongly requested so that the law concerning inheritance gives the same rights to men and women. On another note, it is recommended that the exceptional derogations authorizing the marriage of minors be abolished, which have become “very” not to say “too” common”. It should be noted that more than 20,000 requests for marriage authorization were registered in 2022 and that 13,652 were accepted by Moroccan courts, according to the latest report from the Ministry of Justice.
On the issue of child custody after divorce, the proposal is to give the father the possibility of claiming joint custody provided that the child has reached the age of four. Objective: to allow the child to benefit from both parents despite their divorce. The same goes for legal guardianship, which is systematically attributed to the father of the children. A situation that poses administrative problems for the mother who, in reality, keeps the children. For this, a group of experts calls for the consent of the parents together, and failing that, that the final decision rests with the party who has effective custody of the children.
Another hobbyhorse of many defenders of children's rights: affiliation. This question became very significant when, in 2021, the Moroccan Court of Cassation said no to recognizing the paternity of a child born out of wedlock. The decision surprised many civil society actors who did not hesitate to show their dissatisfaction. "This is a retrograde interpretation and application of the Moudawana," said the Democratic Association of Moroccan Women (ADFM) in a statement published on April 28, 2021. When we know that in Morocco, every day, 200 children are born out of wedlock, according to associative actors, we measure the importance of this point.
For this purpose, the collective for fundamental freedoms recommends allowing in the event that the biological link is proven, in particular by the presentation of a positive DNA test, that the filiation of the father is recognized, determining the fact that he has a marital bond between the two parents.
To date, it is clear that the site of Act 2 of the Moudawana, if announced, is not yet concretely on the table of Moroccan deputies. They were surprised and questioned the Minister of Justice, Abdellatif Ouahbi. It was explained that this is a construction site whose kick-off is the responsibility of King Mohammed VI. Needless to say, the subject is still sensitive within Moroccan society. Illustration: the General Secretariat of the (Islamist) Justice and Development Party has rejected calls for equality in inheritance. “It is in clear contradiction with the Koran,” he said. We understand that once again, in his costume as a master of the temporal and the timeless, the Cherifian sovereign will have to find the optimal trajectory between two visions animated by contrary convictions.
Original article: lepoint.fr
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