A tribal sheikh calls on everyone to be prepared to secure a decent life for the people in Aden.

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Special / Aden The prominent tribal sheikh in southern Yemen, Sheikh Fahim Ahmed bin Ali Muhammad Al-Muhsin Qashash Al-Dawla, warned against not responding to the citizens' demands, which are represented in addressing the economic and service situation in terms of electricity, education, health, water, and roads, and fixing the exchange rate of the Yemeni riyal against foreign currencies, especially the dollar and the Saudi riyal, at the price imposed by the Sana'a government as a minimum, which does not even possess 10% of the revenues that the state possesses in the governorates and regions under its control. The tribal sheikh "Bin Mohsen Qashash" said that the citizens in Aden do not ask the state to build villas, houses, and palaces like those owned by senior and junior officials in the state, nor do they demand that the state make solar energy systems and electric generators like those in the homes of senior officials and influential figures, nor do they ask to be provided with food like what you eat, nor from the finest brands that you wear, nor do they ask that their children be educated in foreign universities where your children study at the expense of the state; rather, their demands are simple, represented in guaranteeing a decent life for them, improving their living standards, and providing essential services such as electricity, water, education, health, roads, and others. The tribal sheikh "Bin Mohsen Qashash" said that many officials and directors of government facilities and institutions, such as banks, have become acting with revenues and financial returns as if they were their own property or the property of their fathers or inherited from their mothers. The tribal sheikh "Bin Mohsen Qashash" said that if the state does not respond to the citizens' demands and abandons its duties towards the honorable and genuine citizen, then the Southern Transitional Council, President Aidaroos Al-Zubaidi, the governor of Aden, and all the honorable people in Aden and the rest of the governorates must bear the responsibility and tighten their control over all revenues of the port of Aden, customs, taxes, and all revenues of government facilities, government banks, and others, and start dedicating them to the benefit of the people of Aden as a first step, and then the neighboring governorates. Sheikh "Bin Mohsen Qashash" listed a number of the simplest rights of citizens and the necessary measures to implement them as a tangible reality in order to improve the lives of citizens, most notably: - Electricity: By developing urgent solutions for electricity and frequent outages. - Government hospitals: Supporting them at a high level, rehabilitating them and their staff to be first-class hospitals, treating patients, and dispensing all medicines to them for free. - Supporting education and teachers, rehabilitating government schools, providing books free of charge to students at all educational levels, and closing private schools (this is just a personal suggestion). - Water: Rehabilitating and repairing water networks and connecting them to all citizens' homes, pumping water to homes on a daily basis, and repairing and restoring water tanks and cleaning them. - Roads: Repairing and restoring roads, paving internal streets, and installing lighting on all roads and internal streets. - Sewers: Creating a healthy sewer network instead of the network whose lifespan has expired and is no longer able to meet the needs of people in light of the large urban expansion that the capital Aden has witnessed during the past three decades. The prominent tribal sheikh in southern Yemen, "Bin Mohsen Qashash," said that if the state, represented by Rashad Al-Alimi, does not start today to develop solutions to the current situation, stop the deterioration of the local currency, and fix the exchange rate of the Yemeni riyal at least at the exchange rate in Sana'a (140 to the Saudi riyal), which their government does not even possess 10% of the revenues that the legitimate government possesses, at a time when the exchange rate against foreign currencies is being raised in the capital Aden deliberately by parties and gangs in the state in order to achieve political goals aimed at subjugating and starving the people and subjecting them to their starvation policies. Sheikh Qashash called for issuing a decision to prevent the Central Bank from selling dollars in public auctions, stopping the floating of the currency, and banning transactions in Saudi riyals in all buying and selling transactions in the local market. Sheikh "Bin Mohsen Qashash" reiterated that if the state does not respond to the citizens' demands, secure a decent life for the citizens, address the economic situation and the deterioration of the currency, support hospitals with all equipment, rehabilitate them at a high level of the first degree, and provide services and medicines free of charge to patients, and support education, teachers, schools, and universities... then people will not remain silent, and everyone must be zealous and stand up for the citizen who is dying of hunger and dying of fevers and diseases spreading due to sewage overflows and power outages and the adopted starvation policy practiced by the state against citizens, and everyone must act and stop the economic collapse and the deterioration of the currency and save this honorable and genuine people, and the citizens must close the Central Bank because it is the main cause of the collapse of the currency by floating the currency and selling dollars in public auctions to exchange dealers and merchants in order to continue the collapse of the currency, and close all government banks and exchange shops, and close the port of the free zone and the port of Al-Mualla and prevent containers from leaving the port, and this is the right way to stop the deterioration of the currency and the only way to force the state to bear responsibility towards this honorable and genuine people. He concluded his statement by saying that "Yemen possesses oil, gas, mineral, agricultural, fish, and tourism wealth, and it has the largest oil and gas reserves in the world in the Empty Quarter desert, which extends from Marib, Shabwa, Hadramout, and Al-Mahra to Oman and eastern Saudi Arabia, and a large reserve of oil and gas in the Gulf of Aden and the continental shelf of the Yemeni island of Socotra, which is estimated at more than 100 billion barrels of oil and more than 50 trillion cubic meters of gas and more than 1,000 tons of gold in several secret mines in the governorates of Hadramout and Al-Mahra," pointing out that "if honest hands were found, the Yemeni people would be among the best people in the world in terms of living and service standards, and these are sufficient resources to lift the deteriorating economic conditions that have plagued Yemen and the Yemeni people for years; rather, Yemen's diverse and enormous wealth qualifies it to mint a gold currency that would be one of the strongest currencies in the world." Sheikh Bin Jubair Al-Awthali said that the state cuts the salaries of employees for months without feeling the suffering that the citizen is experiencing due to the delay in disbursing salaries for months, while the head of the Presidential Council, the seven members of the Presidential Council, the ministers and their deputies, the undersecretaries of ministries, the members of the House of Representatives, and the ambassadors in all countries, the state disburses hundreds of billions as salaries, expenses, cars, and others for them monthly in hard currency and large and huge sums of money, and these exorbitant sums of money that the state spends in hard currency in hundreds of millions of dollars monthly as salaries for officials and gratuities for its loyalists, and these monthly sums are sufficient to arrange solar panels for every house in the capital at a rate of one or two panels per house, so does the state dare to cut the salaries of travel and expenses for the head and members of the Presidential Council, ministers, members of the House of Representatives, and all officials for only two months and allocate these sums to make solar panels for poor and most needy families in Aden? He added that our country has a distinguished strategic location, which is the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and the state must invest it by imposing crossing fees on commercial ships amounting to one million riyals on each commercial ship at a minimum. Also, the tax fees that are collected from cigarette companies provide the state's public treasury with billions of riyals through the fees and revenues imposed by the laws in force on tobacco products and derivatives, as tax fees on cigarettes are considered the second financial resource after oil revenues, and they are sufficient to pay salaries and improve living standards and services as well.