Tafileh: A troubled city of anger and poverty

When the Jordanian army declared a state of emergency in Tafileh to quell protests in April 1989, Mohammad Farhan Amayrah, a retired army officer from the city, requested a two-week leave, claiming his mother was sick.

In fact, Amayrah had different intentions. He wanted to join the protestors, who had to the streets in response to a decision by the Jordanian government to remove state subsidies for fuel derivatives and bread.

Why would I want them to pay foreign experts one fifth of their budget? - Khaled Huneifat, Municipal head

The protests, which came to be known as the "April uprising", first broke out on April 18 in the city of Maan when taxi drivers marched to the governor's house and were met with tear gas and a violent police crackdown. In two days, a number of protestors were killed - eight according to the protestors and two according to the government – but enough to see the demonstrations spread to other towns and cities including Tafileh and Kerak.

It was Ramadan, recalled Amayrah, and demonstrators would take to the streets after breaking fast and in the dark.  "This helped me. It was hard to recognize me in the dark."

Amayrah said he was not at the time concerned about losing his job in the army. As a soldier, he said, "my duty was to defend the country against an external threat. But I wasn't entitled to oppress people who had legitimate rights".

Issues remain the same

The uprising later led to the end of a three-decade martial law era in Jordan and the resumption of democracy. But the conditions – poverty and unemployment – that forced people into the street in first place are still there.

A provider for a family of nine, Amayrah still participates in demonstrations demanding "bread, dignity and social justice", because, he said, "very little has changed" in 26 years. He is surviving. He used his connections to work as a security guard in Tafileh University after retiring from the army.

Home to 91,000 residents, Tafileh governorate has long suffered from poverty and unemployment. The highest rate in Jordan, unemployment in the southern governorate stood at 17.1 percent in 2013, 13 percent and 28.9 percent among men and women respectively. The public sector is still the largest employer in the region, employing 83.4 percent of paid women workers and 69.2 percent of their male counterparts in 2013.

Tafileh is not short of development plans or foreign-funded projects with cute names. However, people interviewed by al-Araby al-Jadeed found it hard to think of any significant positive change that resulted from these programmes. The incumbent head of Greater Tafileh Municipality Khaled Huneifat says that "foreign-funded programmes have failed for the most part, simply because their operational expenditures are too high. Why would I want them to pay foreign experts one fifth of their budget and rent offices in Amman's fancy neighbourhoods? How does Tafileh benefit from this?"

According to Huneifat, the state made a "fatal mistake" in the past, when it sought to provide jobs for the unemployed in the public sector without sound planning. "What you see in the municipality today is just one example of what applies to all public entities, we have more than 500 people and we actually need only a third of them", said Huneifat.

In his position, he added, he faces daily pressure from his own social circles to take on new employees. In his opinion, this has proven to "be a wrong policy that led us to where we stand today, the state should be creating an investment friendly environment based on the distinctive nature of each city".

Micro-finance debt

A member of the local council and the steering committee of a foreign-funded project, Ghada Shabatat agreed with Huneifat's take on the utility of foreign funded projects. "These funds may go to the renovation of a public library or creating child-friendly parks and spaces, but how many job opportunities do they create?" In her opinion, these are "recreational or cultural projects, but that's not what the city is in dire need of."

According to Shabatat, the "forgotten and often overlooked dimension is that people who carefully plan their monthly budgets, calculate their transportation costs and pay monthly instalments on different loans are not likely to go visit a library or a park even if they want to."

Ironically, what makes Tafileh "not appeal" to investors is the very same "high unemployment rate" that the city is expected to address, coupled, said Amayrah, with the absence of the rule of law. Small projects need only small numbers of staff, he said. And he had seen angry demonstrations of unemployed youths demanding they too be hired,

"I have seen instances where people attacked premises of investors, and others where owners had to literally employ more than a hundred guards for their sites just to protect their interests. With this rate of unemployment, you need adequate security to protect and attract investors," said Amayrah.

In Tafileh's city centre, a visitor can see the numerous branches of micro-funded projects that have mushroomed in the city. Micro-funds have different categories of loans, but "loans for household projects" are very popular among the local community. With these types of funds, women are targeted and encouraged to start income-generating projects that require small capital not exceeding 2,000 JDs on average.

However, people interviewed for this article say such funds have had a counterproductive impact, as people who suffer from abject poverty find a source of easy cash but end up in a vicious cycle of debt.

Shabatat said that she had seen "first-hand how micro-loans are spent", adding that "only a small minority of women actually start projects". Shabatat, founder of the first women's society in Tafileh, was herself involved in offering micro-loans as part of a grant the Women's Union received a few years ago, and speaks from experience.

A portent of the future

And Amayrah agreed. From his own experience, he said, he saw "the staff of these funds are always … trying to chase beneficiaries to pay their dues to no avail, which is yet another proof of their failure".  

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an employee of the Development and Employment Fund, which has a total of 12 branches across the country, said she would "immediately stop the micro-loan track and focus instead on the entrepreneurship track that gives beneficiaries up to 75,000 JDs", if she had the choice.

According to this employee, "we are aware that 90 percent of beneficiaries of household loans do not intend to start any project, but need the money to pay for the education of their children, buying new furniture and other costs that are irrelevant to the fund". She pointed out that there is no "clear follow-up mechanism on this category of loans because we cannot respect the privacy of people's households, which makes follow-up visits inappropriate for both parties".

An official from the administration of the Development and Employment Fund, who also wished to remain anonymous, dismissed the criticism, however, as "inaccurate generalizations". He explained that "there are too many success stories that prove these claims wrong", and "the percentage of people who cannot pay their dues does not exceed 1 percent."

According to the source, 112 loans were given in Tafileh in the first quarter of 2015, creating a total of 154 jobs and marking another "achievement" of a fund that reaches all Jordanians thanks to "mobile units that go to areas many Jordanians have never heard of".

Maybe so. But there is little doubting that anger is boiling in places like Tafileh. It bodes ill for the future. Amayrah, who is representative of many in this city, believes that all "decent Jordanians are either deceased or jailed". He says he has advised foreign ambassadors before to "actually head to Tafileh themselves and directly oversee any foreign-funded project to ensure transparency".

Until then, he said, he doesn't want "a single foreign grant to go to the state treasury".