“ I would bet every euro I possess to invest and settle in Marrakesh for once and all”, a foreign friend of mine once told me.
Morocco has become a dreamland for foreingers as well as for Moroccans. A dream so dear and queer!!!
Let us go back a little into history and try to rapidly survey the main reasons behind such a dream.
Right after its independence, Morocco had witnessed a drastic exploitation of the intellegentia— the countless number of people holding the fifth grade certificate – referred to in the Morrocan dialect as “shahaada”— up to the hard-to-find PhD or even BA holders. Getting a govermental job was the daydream of every single Moroccan at the time.
Another stage of the Moroccan dream took place in the early nineties. Scores of people embarked towards Europe. Unlike the eighties, the study-oriented emmigration period, a great number of the emmigratnts of the nineties headed to Europe with the aim of having their wallets fat. No surprise. Europe was in dire need of employers, and Morocco was one of its rich workforce source at the time.
But currently, Morocco is undergoing yet another “developmental” stage. The National Innitiative for Human Development (NIHD) was the hallmark of this stage. Morocco’s big workshops aim at encouraging the "self-do" and "the can-do" innitiatives. The government has suddenly become “bountiful”! Huge sums of money are at the disposal of every Moroccan willing to set up a project, an enterprise, a coop, or an association. Just think of a “project” and fill in some papers; you will get the aid-- micro-credits.
Admittedly, Morocco has radically changed over the last decade. Everyone can palpably see the wind of change. Nevertheless, many Moroccan youths still do not trust the new proposals of the government. Lack-- or maybe better absence of confidence-- is very pervalent amongst the masses. And still the thorny question repeatedly poses itself: how can the NIHD reach its underlying goals in a context of disbelief and dissatisfaction?
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