Weam Wahhab, President of the Unification Party, stated that he is against Gebran Bassil holding onto the Ministry of Energy and that it would be suspicious if Bassil did so.
Wahhab also stated that he personally calls for civil society to take over the Ministries of Energy, Communication, and Health.
His objections against Bassil are shared among many in the country, dreading another chapter of darkness in Lebanon’s history where electricity supply is scarce.
During his term, Bassil held onto the Ministry of Energy while refusing to allow the natural rotation to take place. Speculations were that either this specific Ministry pumps gold or that Bassil and Hezbollah had a deal to obstruct the cabinet sessions.
Because of Bassil’s insistence on heading the ministry for the past 12 years, whether himself or via his party FPM, there’s an amount of 40 billion dollars reported to be wasted in corruption.
Bassil had also refused Kuwaiti funding at the time to help fix the electricity situation in Lebanon and he is allegedly the reason behind the development and spreading of fuel cartels that resulted in a black market.
All this has led Lebanon to face a worsening problem in the electricity sector, which has dilapidated factories, and long hours of rationing that exceed 12 hours a day.
This has forced the majority of people in the country to pay two bills, one for the state barely supplying electricity, and a high one for owners of private electricity generators to compensate for the lack of state supplies.
Despite not coming from a political inheritance, Bassil has managed to leave his footprint on the Lebanese political scene as someone who has participated in all the many aspects of Lebanese politics and the country’s affairs, the good and the bad, with the bad outweighing everything else.
