Jordan News

Mohammed Al-Rantissi

Hala Zawati’s professional competence cannot be questioned, as she has had a weighty career at the local and foreign levels, but that was for many before she assumed her duties as Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources from 2018 to this day. Over the past years, he made it a target of popular and even parliamentary bombing.

Perhaps the most prominent description of Zawati’s critics is “illusion seller,” and they mean the illusion of oil in Jordan, which appeared from the minister’s statements in this regard, that the wealth of Jordan and Jordanians is only a matter of time, and that oil is abundant in the depths of the Jordanian land, waiting only for the minister’s efforts, although the The state’s long-known narrative, which it conveys to the people whenever necessary, is that “oil is a dream,” and that the kingdom suffers from scarcity of resources and tight hands.

Here, the minds of Jordanians will not, and will not, be missed, the scene in which Zawati put herself and Prime Minister Bishr al-Khasawneh, when she presented him in front of the media cameras, a bottle of oil produced by the Hamza field, after which a wave of widespread mockery exploded on the one hand, and “surprises” on the one hand. Others, the most prominent of which was the astonishment that the minister put herself in this acrobatic scene that underestimates minds and contains illusion.

Zawati passed peacefully from that scene and its consequences, but then fell into the trap of statements regarding the possibility of Jordan exporting energy and electricity in particular, which also provoked the ridicule of many, before something like a thunderbolt occurred, the famous electricity outage that occurred on Friday at the end of May. The past, and lasted for hours, which at the time sparked widespread controversy and sharp criticism of the minister, whose statements about the incident deepened the campaigns against her more and more.

Before and after, Zawati was not spared the bombing that affected her performance, “some of it with innocent motives and the other with goals,” whether it was on a popular level appearing on social media platforms, or on a parliamentary level embodied by memos for interrogation and harsh statements against her, but that All did not come to fruition, and the minister remained in her position amid questions about the secret of steadfastness.

As for the answers, there are those who see that Lazwati has extensions in decision-making centers that constitute for her “as much as possible” what looks like immunity, in an effort to keep it as long as possible, in contrast to those who look at the matter innocently, and therefore see that she did not commit what actually requires her exclusion.

Returning to her competence, Fazwati held the position of Executive Director of the Jordan Strategies Forum, and Executive Director of the Edama Association for Energy, Water and Environment. Numerous consultations in energy affairs for the House of Representatives.

Zawati has also worked as a consultant for several programs of the American Development Agency, the German Development Agency, the Japanese Development Agency, the European Union and the United Nations Development Program. And a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Giving and Giving and the Jordanian Women’s Renaissance Association.

Zawati holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Jordan in 1987, and Senior Management from Universidade de Empresa in Madrid in 2007, in addition to a certificate in Leadership and Development from Harvard University, and an Eisenhower Fellow.

Zawati will certainly leave her position sooner or later, but a comment by one of her critics appears in this article, in which he said, “Oh my fear, Tamar has championed Judeh.” He means the continuation of the former Foreign Minister, Nasser Judeh, in his position from 2009 to 2017, which is the matter Which was raising a lot of criticism before Ayman Safadi was appointed in his place.