Yemen's Experience with Technocratic Government

Spread the Word

A technocratic government is an administrative and political model that entrusts decision-making to individuals chosen for their scientific competence and technical expertise in specific fields, rather than for their political loyalties or electoral popularity. Such governments are typically formed during crises or transitional phases, deliberately set apart from political, regional, sectarian and partisan considerations, with the stated aim of delivering technical and economic solutions grounded in scientific data. The word itself is a useful place to begin.

What a technocratic government is

The term “technocrat” derives from two Greek roots: techne, meaning art or skill, and kratos, meaning power or rule — literally, the rule of experts. In political terms, a technocratic government is a cabinet of competencies that is appointed rather than elected. The prime minister selects ministers from among those with demonstrated expertise in their respective fields: an economist to run the Ministry of Finance, an experienced academic for the Ministry of Education, a seasoned physician for the Ministry of Health, and so on. Ministers are not required to hold party membership, and they are often expected to maintain political neutrality for the duration of their mandate.

The model is neither new nor uniquely Middle Eastern. Europe has repeatedly turned to it in moments of financial emergency. In 2011, Italy handed power to the economist and former European commissioner Mario Monti after its established politicians proved unable to contain a sovereign-debt crisis; a decade later, the former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi was summoned to a similar task. Greece, in the same period, entrusted a provisional government to Lucas Papademos, another central banker. In each case the appeal was identical: at a moment of danger, expertise was thought to offer what ordinary politics could not.

In practice, a technocratic government tends to emerge through a recognisable sequence. The supreme executive authority — the head of state or head of government — judges that circumstances require it, usually amid political or economic crisis or during a transitional phase. Ministers are then chosen based on qualifications, practical experience and a proven record, rather than party loyalty or popularity. They are generally expected to remain politically neutral, and the government’s mandate is limited to a defined mission: managing a crisis, supervising elections, or driving through economic reform. Once that mission is complete, an elected government is meant to take its place.

Why technocracies are summoned

Technocratic governments usually appear in specific contexts. The first is crisis management, when an acute economic emergency or financial collapse demands rapid, effective technical solutions unclouded by political manoeuvring. The second is the transitional phase that follows conflict or revolution, when political parties have exhausted their credibility and a government of competencies is preferred to steer the state until elections can be held. The third is structural reform — of the banking, education or health systems — where specialised expertise is enlisted to implement programmes that may be difficult or politically unpopular. The fourth is the breaking of political deadlock, when partisan division has paralysed institutions and a neutral cabinet is formed to keep the machinery of government running.

Strengths and weaknesses

In theory, the advantages are considerable. Decisions are meant to rest on scientific study, data analysis and accumulated experience, raising the odds that public policy will actually work. Distance from party affiliation is supposed to insulate decisions from political conflict and to place the public interest above narrow ones. Installing genuine experts should improve administrative efficiency, and a focus on technical and service objectives should allow urgent problems to be solved quickly. In the absence of partisan quotas, appointments based on competence rather than loyalty ought to reduce the corruption that quota systems breed.

Yet technocracy carries serious structural and political drawbacks. Because its members are not elected, it lacks democratic legitimacy; it does not represent the people or express their will, and that distance from popular consent can provoke protest or outright rejection. Its narrow technical focus may leave it without the strategic or consensual vision that major national questions demand. Expertise, moreover, tends to be concentrated in particular social and economic classes, so a technocracy can harden into a “technical aristocracy” that speaks for only a fraction of society. The absence of elections weakens direct accountability and can leave decision-makers indifferent to citizens’ daily needs. And an excessive faith in statistics and models risks neglecting human realities and local cultural contexts, producing policies that are efficient on paper but unacceptable in practice.

The Yemeni experience

That is the theory. Yemen’s experience tells a harsher story. The country’s political scene has too often been dominated by figures with little grasp of even recent Yemeni history, let alone its medieval or ancient past. Whenever a political term becomes fashionable, they seize upon it and repeat it around the clock. “Technocrat” is the latest such word, propelled into circulation by its appearance in discussions of the ceasefire arrangements between Israel and Hamas as the proposed instrument for governing Gaza.

Yet Yemen’s encounter with technocratic government is far older than the current fashion. The first cabinet formed after unification, headed by the engineer Haidar Abu Bakr al-Attas of the Yemeni Socialist Party, was a quota-based coalition, but it was conceived as a transitional body charged with preparing for elections; as a government led by a technician during a transitional phase, it might loosely be called technocratic. When the first parliamentary elections were held in April 1993, the General People’s Congress emerged as the largest party. Rather than govern alone, it chose to form a coalition with the Yemeni Socialist Party — its partner in achieving unification — and the Islah party, in order to avoid open political conflict. That coalition collapsed with the 1994 civil war, which ended in the defeat of the Socialists and their removal from power, after which the Congress governed alongside Islah. In the elections of April 1997, the Congress won an overwhelming majority and remained the sole party forming governments until 2011. Most of those cabinets were, to a significant degree, technocratic in character.

Indeed — and here lies the irony that today’s enthusiasts overlook — technocratic government was the defining feature of the entire era of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Though his opponents mocked him as unlettered because he never attended university, Saleh consistently leaned on specialists and men of proven competence. Hardly a cabinet in his long rule was without them, from prime ministers such as Dr Abdulaziz Abdulghani, who held a master’s degree in economics and an honorary doctorate, to figures like Dr Abdulkarim al-Iryani, Faraj bin Ghanem and Ali Mujawar. The governments of Abdulqadir Bajammal and Ali Mohammed Mujawar in particular were filled with doctorate-holders and engineers.

The numbers are striking. In one of Bajammal’s cabinets, the count of PhD-holders reached nineteen, alongside five engineers and a defence minister with an academic degree — twenty-five specialised technocrats among thirty-three ministers, supplemented by six ministers of long experience, with only the remaining five holding bachelor’s degrees. By any definition it was a technocratic government. These cabinets were also assembled to satisfy the World Bank, which was helping Yemen implement an economic-reform programme and demanded financial and administrative transparency and the empowerment of competent people as a condition of its aid and loans.

And yet did the performance of these governments match the credentials of their members? It did not. In this author’s judgement, Bajammal’s technocratic cabinets were among the most corrupt in Yemen’s history — leaving aside the period after 2011, which scarcely belongs to any coherent account of the country at all. Both the World Bank and Saleh had assumed that Yemeni technocrats were of the same breed found elsewhere: competent, academic individuals who honour their qualifications and enter government only in response to a higher national interest, out of a sense of responsibility at critical moments, to steer the homeland to safety. Yemeni technocracy, in this telling, proved to be something else entirely — degree-holders who practised the theft of public money in professional and “scientific” ways.

The charges the author levels are specific. When a technocratic prime minister came from Taiz, such as Abdulaziz Abdulghani, the government is said to have taken on a regional colour, with Taizis placed throughout the state’s administrative apparatus — even as rumours circulated that he was powerless. When the minister of civil service, Hamoud Khaled al-Soufi, was likewise from Taiz, and specifically from Sharab, jobs and appointments are said to have flowed to Taizis in general and to the people of Sharab in particular — a bias so pronounced that a fellow Taizi is reported to have mocked it in verse, ending with the line, “You Sharab-ised it, O Hamoud.” When the minister of higher education, Dr Abdulwahab Rawah, was from Taiz, scholarships and study grants are said to have been distributed on a regional basis, with the overwhelming share going to Taizis. And when the deputy minister of finance, Saleh Shaaban of the Aras area, held office, finance directors across the ministries and governorates are alleged to have been appointed from his own district.

The most dramatic accusation concerns Dr Mustafa Bahran, a minister holding a doctorate in nuclear physics, who is said to have persuaded the head of state to pursue a nuclear-energy electricity project. Studies were carried out and a tender worth four billion dollars issued — only, in the author’s account, for the president to discover that the winning company belonged to Bahran himself, who had arranged for a former American classmate to establish a firm to secure the contract and then subcontract the actual work for a single billion, with the balance diverted to Bahran and his associate. The president is said to have halted the tender.

The pattern, the author argues, extended to the ministries most prized by today’s advocates — information and culture. Hussein Dhaifallah al-Awadi, a prominent columnist appointed minister of information, at first raised the hopes of journalists who saw one of their own reach high office; but his tenure, in this account, became one of pursuing and sidelining the very colleagues he had once stood among, with more press cases and imprisonments than under his predecessors, until Saleh replaced him with Hassan al-Lawzi — a man once ill-regarded who, after al-Awadi, came to seem a defender of free expression. Khaled al-Ruwaishan, who moved from the General Book Authority to the Ministry of Culture to prepare Sana’a as Arab Capital of Culture, is accused of leaving the authority with debts exceeding ten billion riyals and of spending the capital-of-culture budget on fictitious items and superficial festivals, before selling two of the ministry’s buildings in Aden for more than four hundred million riyals whose destination was never explained. His removal, the author notes, pushed him toward the 2011 protests.

Nor, in this account, are the technocrats of the Muslim Brotherhood spared. Dr Saif al-Asali, finance minister under Mujawar, is charged with paralysing the budget and halting government institutions by freezing their operating allocations, plunging the country into stagnation until the president replaced him. Dr Khaled al-Wasabi, minister of higher education in the current government, is accused of turning grants and scholarships into a private preserve for the Islah party, with — according to leaked documents cited by the author — the overwhelming majority going to its members and much of the remainder to the sons of well-placed officials. Dr Abdulmalik al-Makhlafi, for his part, is said to have turned the foreign ministry into a Taiz-centred fiefdom during his tenure.

The author reserves particular scorn for the present moment, in which many of the same currents now campaign for a technocratic government even as, he contends, Rashad al-Alimi, head of the Presidential Leadership Council, has “technocratised” the interior ministry until it is dominated by his own Al-Aloom area of Taiz, and has directed electricity and asphalt to that area alone. The single figure to whom, in the author’s estimation, the honourable meaning of the word genuinely applies is Dr Yahya al-Shaibi — the one man he believes capable of solving Yemen’s problems in both south and north, and who is, he laments, kept in reserve rather than empowered to form a government of his own choosing.

Technocratic government is, at bottom, an intermediate model between politics and technique, summoned in exceptional times to repair structural defects or urgent crises. It can improve governmental performance and supply solutions grounded in evidence, but it remains legally and democratically limited unless folded into a broader framework that guarantees popular representation and genuine accountability. Yemen’s experience, in the author’s unsparing verdict, shows no meaningful difference between its technocratic and its partisan governments — and, worse, suggests that technocracy exploited the people’s illiteracy, turning ministerial office into a means of self-enrichment and a tool for serving families, tribes, sects and regions. Whether the country’s next government of “competencies” can escape that history is the question its champions have yet to answer.

Dr Sadek al-Salemi