Martin Jay: Morocco has a real problem with its global image

How the rest of the world perceives Morocco is growing increasingly important and yet Rabat seems to ignore its own relentless failure to promote the country and attract much needed foreign investment. That public image should be fixed though when millions come here for the World Cup, right?

 

How much emphasis does the royal palace and the Rabat elite in general, place on Morocco’s international image, both as a modern, developing MENA country but also as an attractive location for foreign investment? It would seem absolutely none whatsoever.

Morocco’s ambitions are not a mystery and we so we don’t need to waste time pontificating. It wants and needs foreign investment badly, as, if we are to believe Tel Quel magazine, the prime minister is personally responsible for ‘losing’ 150,000 jobs a year. Of course, this argument is somewhat juvenile as more responsibility should be placed on his cabinet of ministers tasked with managing the economy and a plethora of ineffective institutions which only drain the state coffers and do little else.

There’s no question that Morocco needs foreign investment like never before in its history as only Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) can quickly create jobs and divert the country away from another Arab Spring. And I’m not talking about companies who invest 50 or 100 million dollars. This barely registers. Morocco needs mega projects in the billions to create jobs and to stabilize its economy which seems to still be in suffering from what Rabat hacks euphemistically call “over heating”. Many of the every day components of an economy which register with economists – rent, food, utilities, fuel – have noticed that a lot has doubled in price in the last two years. While electricity, diesel and basic vegetables remain more or less the same, many of the other living expenses, especially raw materials and services, have doubled which makes life harder for the masses, cripples small businesses and slows growth.

Is foreign investment the answer to all these woes? And if so, why doesn’t the government make it a real priority?

Foreign investment is the silver bullet but the reasons why Rabat doesn’t take it more seriously are more complicated. One argument is that those employed to drive this agenda are simply ill qualified. Another is that there is a tone deafness in Rabat towards a global perception towards the country, a numbness which I would argue really needs to be faced.

Never again Fedex Morocco

Recently I tried to purchase a 150 USD Chinese watch from Ali Express, a decision I really regret as this watch so far has cost me 2000 USD in lost time chasing it up and dealing with sensational incompetence from Fedex and a fiscal system which seems to be morally bereft and only focused on extracting cash from a gullible public at any cost. “It’s a Rolex” a customs offer told my friend simply by looking at the photo from the internet, of the AliExpress website where it is clearly advertised for sale at 1600 dhms with the brand clear to see. This is after a month of emails, calls, visits to Fedex in Marrakech, who have an office which is made up of junk furniture from the tip. The list of errors this company made with my order is too long to list. But the conclusion from customs and the company that they work adds up to the same. The mistakes they make, the customer pays for. I experienced this myself first hand when in 2019 my company imported some solar inverters from Lebanon. First of all the customs deemed them as battery chargers and wanted 15% import duty. They then admitted that they had made a mistake and could see they were inverters which should be zero duty from Lebanon but then insisted on 2.5%. I was to pay for storage even though that was down to their incompetence. It felt like being mugged. Does Rabat see that this level of desperation from the tax authorities doesn’t get noticed around the world? Or ‘ease of doing business’ – a standard criteria of FDI – isn’t seen? Do foreign investors look at franchises such as Fedex Maroc?

So why doesn’t Rabat join up the dots and clean its act up?

 

Failed state of Amizmiz

It’s a similar story with the Gendarmerie in Morocco who are the nation’s police force but in reality are really tax collectors on the highway. Recently I have noticed in Amizmiz where I live a new, aggressive strategy to collect undocumented “fines” if that’s what we need to call them which seems to have got out of control. On market day here dozens of peasants from the villages in the mountains who came down with their three wheeler transport motorcycles were asked to show the gendarmerie their insurance papers. Given how the economy has squeezed these poor people almost out of existence, it should come as no surprise that none had them. Each of them were expected to pay a 500 dirham “fine” for them to avoid the courts. And it’s not only poor people who are being targeted. My wife and myself were recently stopped and received the shake down with one officer threatening her when she reached for her phone to show a hospital certificate of having a stomach cancer to explain why she didn’t wear her seatbelt – he thought she was going to film them at their work. Why so nervous about being filmed? The whole country knows why as what the Gendarmerie do is, at best, described as controversial as the level of bribe taking now at road blocks is now a youtube sensation, with scores of Moroccans – usually young – recording it and uploading it. Rabat government workers in Agdal can no longer close their eyes to it and pretend it doesn’t exist as the cat now is out of the bag.

 

The Gendarmie in Atlas mountain villages is a scandal. These young officers now in Amizmiz are proud of their thuggish manner, with some even smoking cigarettes as they carry out their daily harassment of the poor– people so poor due to the state’s incompetence or neglect of its duty, that some are still living in tents almost one and a half years after the earthquake. Watching them harass the poor is like watching a scene from Schindler’s List with Nazis smoking cigarettes as their friends slaughter with their Lugers.

There is no level of Moroccan society which is not affected by baksheesh (petty corruption). Even those buildings in Amizmiz which collapsed on people did so due to shoddy building standards which somehow evaded the normal rules.

And yet here in Amizmiz we see baksheesh shine in all its glory as younger officers make good on harassment while lawlessness is in abundance. This small town has so many children riding 150cc motorcycles like lunatics at high speed that it’s a miracle that a recent tragic death of a young girl isn’t a weekly event.Apparently Rabat has not learnt any lessons by two Scandinavian tourists who were raped and murdered in this region in 2018. We can only hope these young motorized vagabonds don’t kills any tourists wondering about.

The outskirts of the town look like an environmental Armageddon as hundreds of tonnes of garbage fill the ravines and crannies of the farms, not the kind of images that the brigades of English language fake news outfits in Rabat like to illustrate when pumping up the narrative about Green Morocco. Government institutions here simply don’t function.

 

A small picturesque mountain village where young gendarmerie arrive with nothing but leave two years later with a new car and a smart pad in Marrakech. This is what I’m told over and over again by locals in the village although the smart cars I have seen myself and, bearing in mind these officers only earn 5000 dhms a month, we can hardly say that this business is clandestine. And I have also seen the bribes being paid at the roadblocks with my own eyes. Too many times now, to the point where I have to look away out of embarrassment and sympathy to the officers.

Does Rabat not think that this level of corruption is not registered by foreigners employed by the multi nationals to rank Morocco? Again, international public perception affects foreign investors and the decisions they make.

 

Rabat’s own rebel has Brit tizzy fit

Recently I was quite amazed to see Rachid Achachi write an editorial complaining about the British not supporting Rabat’s position on Western Sahara. This highly articulate young commentator, who we could pigeon hole as Rabat’s acceptable ‘rebel without a cause’ made me laugh. His article laments how London, now with a new socialist government, has gone back on previous pledges made about supporting Rabat’s sovereignty on the disputed region, which Maghrebi warned its reader of months ago. What did Rabat expect? Its own diplomats fumbled an opportunity to get a free trade deal out of the previous government and just indulged itself with a concentration of fake news of the last few years which sexed up the “special” relationship between London and Rabat. This is the problem of having a media in Morocco who are so indoctrinated into following an agenda and pursuing a narrative which isn’t even faintly true. There is no special relationship between the UK and Morocco. There is only a desire for one, which is not the same thing at all. For christ’s sake, we don’t even respect the validity of one another’s driving licenses so Achachi’s hue and cry is at best naïve and at worst incongruent to reality. But who is really interested in the truth?

The malign truth is that foreign investors in the UK are not impressed with Morocco. If they were, they would have lobbied the British government during its conservative rule to push the draft free trade agreement through when it was sitting in a drawer in the minister’s office and gathering dust – as they would have benefited from hundreds of millions of pounds in subsidies. The international perception of Morocco and some of its failings which I’ve mentioned get back to the FDI community. Morocco doesn’t seem to have any sensibility at all towards its global perception and can’t see how totally disinvesting in journalists has consequences. A couple of examples recently which perhaps Rabat could mull.

Morocco’s perception around the world as a favourable FDI location is already abysmally low. The woeful lack of success stories can’t be ignored when the sheer level of opportunity in this beautiful country is axiomatic

Recently, foreigners keep reading in their timelines the story of Morocco intending to slaughter 3 million dogs ahead of the world cup. Does Rabat not think this also impacts FDI? The interesting thing about this is that it was simply a rumour started by a odly-coiffed batty old British woman who fills her empty days campaigning about animal rights. The rumour gained momentum and larger international animal rights groups then bought into it and it is now a media ‘fact’.

But it isn’t a fact. It’s actually bullshit.

Is the Moroccan government in the process of shooting or poisoning 3 MILLION dogs? No. Where’s the evidence? Have any of these animal rights organizations shown even a shred of evidence that this cull is under way or about to start? No. But this is what happens when you disinvest in media – which is what Morocco has done in the last 15 years – and invest in fake news. When others put out fake news, you don’t have the real journalists on your side to counter it. So it festers. It becomes the truth. For years Rabat has gone to extraordinary lengths to make it harder and harder for real journalists to move here and make Morocco their home. And so when journalists who are in any of these EU countries are presented with such sensational stories like the dog cull, there is a tendency to not to bother with the fact checking.

 

Algerianization of Moroccan press?

In 2007, when I first arrived and there were 155 foreign journalists based here, the fake news story about the dogs wouldn’t have made it to publication as it would have been run by the local correspondent in Morocco. This is what is so funny about Achahi’s rant about the British. This commentator’s views are no doubt echoed by the Agdal Brigade – the same people don’t see cash being handed over at Gendarmerie roadblocks and so therefore insist there is no baksheesh in Morocco – but are steered by an erroneous PR strategy which keeps blowing up in Morocco’s face. You can’t support a fake news campaign about, say, the wonderful relations between Rabat and London – and then whine when you don’t get what you want. It was a lie in the first place. And as for taking a swipe at the British ambassador. Doesn’t his lack of faith in the Sahara project merely prove the point further? If there were real journalists – both Moroccan and foreign – allowed to work freely in the country there would be no surprises about London not backing the Sahara. And this coming from Rabat’s in house rebel, who recently complained about the “Algeriaization” of Morocco press? Perhaps if Rabat actually embraced foreign journalists and even had a few of them as friends both in Rabat and London, maybe in the last few months of the Conservative party’s rule, the draft free trade agreement for Western Sahara could have been signed off, opening a flood gate of BILLIONS not Millions of lovely crisp UK pounds to head to Dahlia.

The similar own goals can be seen with tourism. Surely tourism is a success story, right? Well, it is at least according to Rabat as the recent figures are impressive. But wait. Scratch the surface and you see that this arrogance from the country’s elite refuses to see that the high numbers are also a curse. Last year in April chaos descended on Marrakech airport as the chronic lack of organization led to thousands of people waiting 3 or even 4 hours to even enter the country. Does Rabat not think this is picked up around the world? Look at what one tourist wrote on one website.

 

“I flew there today and it was horrendous!” wrote Valerie Sharoe. “Never again will I fly into Marrakesh . It was awful getting in and awful getting out. My first time in Morocco and unfortunately unlikely to return. There were elderly people and children queuing for hours with no help from staff. Passport control were on their phones joking around. Very sad to experience this in this day”. To sum up, Morocco can’t handle the 15m tourists who each will have their own horror stories, with pictures, to show on their own social media accounts.

It would seem in Morocco the infrastructure can’t even manage people who are coming here to put money into the country’s economy. Imagine what the perception will be during the World Cup when those same foreigners take to social media. The impact could be cataclysmic. Is Rabat ready for that?

Morocco’s perception around the world as a favourable FDI location is already abysmally low. The woeful lack of success stories can’t be ignored when the sheer level of opportunity in this beautiful country is axiomatic. Even within the country, try finding one foreigner who made money here. If there were any, you would think that the under-performing AMDIE would parade them for others to see, or the equally useless CRI’s – regional investment bureaus – who are so inept at attracting FDI that rumours are often heard of them being scrapped altogether. AMDIE, we should never forget put an advert on the side of a London bus a while back with the words “Morocco Now!”. Presumably Japanese tourists were intrigued by this as indeed were the British public. This ‘WTF’ stunt gives an indication as to the tone deafness of Rabat and how it just can’t promote itself to save its own life.

The country has a real image problem which can be blamed on the ruling elite which closes its eyes to the indicators of a failing economy and authoritarianism showing its ugly head more and more. And of course corruption becoming out of control. It’s time to get serious about going to the professionals and admitting the obvious. Rabat simply cannot do PR on a global scale as it is tied down by loyalties to its own kin when it hands out jobs, a point even the King hinted, in a recent speech, which needs to be tackled. But how much longer can the economy take being beaten to death by this blinkered vision of its own success and failure? Recently the Moroccan press reported on the number of Moroccan businesses who bought foreign franchises going bust. But when the cost of living has doubled in recent years, surely this should come as no surprise.

Rabat needs to take the same course that an alcoholic takes when confronting its own problems. Admitting its own guilt. The wholesale failure of AMDIE, the CRIs and the diplomatic service, not to mention the government in general, is all part of foreign investors shunning Morocco. It needs to embrace a completely new way of thinking about how to bring in foreign investment and this must start with how it regards PR and the international press in general.

For most, Morocco, despite being stunningly beautiful, comes with a number of hidden taxes. My own Chinese watch is going to cost me a bloody fortune. Can we say Morocco is the real deal or a fake Rolex? When I get the watch I might give it to the local police chief in Amizmiz. I have a feeling he’s going to call me any day now.

 

Martin Jay is an award winning journalist, owner and editor in chief of Maghrebi whose career has spanned over 34 years as a foreign correspondent for too many media giants to mention. He can be followed on X at  @MartinRJay