Governments and people have to embrace change

As politicians across the Middle East ride the turmoil created by the revolutions of the Arab Spring, they are struggling to define where they want their peoples to go. The politicians are also struggling to get people to listen to them, as their language is stuck in the past, and their challenge is to make their rhetoric relevant to people's cares.

It is startling that changes in the Middle East are no longer being organised in presidential offices, nor discussed in parliamentary debating chambers, nor planned in the ante-rooms and majlises of the great and the powerful, as they have done for decades.

The power of the internet and effects of better education means that more Arabs have more access to more information than they have ever done in the past. The power created by people's access to whatever they want to see has yet to fully unfold, but the fall of the governments in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya; and the continuing unrest in Syria and Yemen are a tribute to the new forces loose in the Arab world.

People's hopes are now defining the agenda in many part of the Arab World, and governments are having to learn how to shift from authoritarian control of the people and the information that they can see, to an entirely different style of relationship in which both rulers and the people share access to information.

Governments now have the new responsibility of inspiring people, and seeking to energise them and channel their energies.

An important example is Egypt, which is the Arab world's largest country and a traditional political leader of the region. It lost that status as the Mubarak government took it firmly into the American camp, with no room for manoeuvre which excluded it from offering much to the rest of the Arab world.

As the elections grind on in Egypt, it is clear that the secularist who led the revolution in January has not formed a coherent political party. What is more surprising is that the religious parties, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, have also failed to offer one coherent message, and some seek more active coalition politics, and others more religious exclusivity.

There is almost certainly going to be some religious party in whatever coalition emerges, but it seems less likely to be the ‘Islamist takeover' that so many secularists feared.

It is also very possible that the long-entrenched military and political establishment may try to retain some of their cherished power. But the real change is not the astonishing collapse of the Mubarak government, nor in the parliamentary elections and political shuffling as new parties go through the totally new exercise of seeking policies that might take them to power.

The real change is in the education the people are getting, and if that remains inadequate, it is being brutally exposed as such thanks to anyone's free access to information through the internet. The much-vaunted people power of the 21st century has yet to really take hold in the Arab world, but the Arab Spring is a power message that the 65 per cent of the average Arab population that is under 25 years old is on the march. They know that they will define the future of the Arab world.

In the UAE, this power of this demographic shift is well understood, and as one government minister said during the public debates on how to nurture the UAE's national identity, "the government can lead, and can offer the best it can [referring to education, training and opportunities] but ultimately all we can do is trust our young people".

Those countries that come through the next two or threw decades with any degree of stable transformation will be those led by governments who know that change is inevitable and that the best they can do is to seek to involve the minds of their young people in caring for their society.

This is why improving the quality of education is so important. People who understand the challenges and are ready to take them on and succeed are far more likely to cope with the changes more effectively than those who are shocked and frightened by the new world descending on them.

It is essential that people are taught to think for themselves, and reject the old-style learning by rote.

It may be uncomfortable for anyone in authority to be questioned, but without such signs of people being alive, society is doomed to decay.

The UAE is full of courses in entrepreneurship, social values, corporate social responsibility, and this activity may seem like so much well-meant rhetoric, but without this kind of thinking, the transformation of Arab countries like the UAE to their proper place in the 21st century will be much harder.