This afternoon I took my daughter to her UC MAS class at Dharubaaruge and was walking back to visit a friend, when as I turned around Kalaafaanu School corner, I hear someone saying, “Fahun kaiveni kurumun mussanjakaa innan faseeyha vaane.” I turned to look around and saw a young woman talking to a girl in her late teens.

It’s interesting how women are forced to think in these testing times in Male’. Life has become so unbearable in Male for young people. There’s hardly a way to survive in Male unless you have some means of “external support”. It used to be uncles and aunts who supported you but now its “affordable friends” who provide for the shortfall in your daily expenses. And young girls are the most vulnerable.

The Special Majlis which was charged with charting the future of our country, is now expediting their drafting of the constitution. They have not come up with anything new. They have been short sighted and “un-visionary”. The country will remain a very inefficient and economically “un-viable” twenty atolls with nearly two hundred administrative “islands”. There will be nearly a hundred ministers and deputy ministers, twenty atoll chiefs, over a thousand island chiefs and assistant island chiefs.

The members of the Special Majlis seem to be more concerned about nitty gritties than coming up with a basis for the principles on which the nation will be built. They seemed to be making laws than making a constitution. And that too, a stale one. For example, they passed a chapter which said that says that primary and middle school education will be provided free to all children and that all Maldivians will have access to higher education. Interesting thing is that this was an objective of an Education Sector Plan that was developed at a meeting in Eydhafushi over ten years ago. And that is more like legislation than constitutional reform.

What has made us what we are today, despite thirty years of development, is a lack of understanding of economics, human development and efficienct execution matrices. The constituent assemly that will be concluding the drafting of the new constitution lacks those as well, and lack the vision and the wisdom to chart the country’s future.

So it is not a surprise to have our young wondering how to best find a life at the mercy of the rich and the influential.