Arab states standing in their citizens’ queue

My relatively wealthy friend used to sympathise with us: the people of queues. We queue for almost everything: to board a bus, to see a dentist, to buy a one‑-;-pound bargain from a discount shop. We always find a way to deceive ourselves: saving a little money, postponing expenses, convincing ourselves that waiting is a small price for a cheaper life.
He, on the other hand, never queues. He prefers to pay more rather than place himself in a long line. That is the privilege of money: you buy your time, not just your goods. And here lies the inequality: those who have money can escape the deadly queues-;- those who have less time,´-or-work in precarious jobs, pay the price twice: in nerves, in dignity and in the slow erosion of their lives.
But the queue is no longer a social habit´-or-a sign of “civilised order.” In today’s world, the queue has become a demographic, economic and political dilemma. People are stuck in queues because governments are unable,´-or-unwilling, to make their lives easier. Some states manage their failures by pushing citizens into waiting lines.
This is where my favorite writer, Tim Harford, elevates the queue from a social joke to a political‑-;-economic diagnosis of the state. He begins with Britain, a country where queuing was once a symbol of discipline and respect, and shows how it has become a mirror of systemic failure. The United Kingdom, he argues, does not suffer from isolated crises but from an entire ecosystem of visible and invisible queues, now -function-ing as a semi‑-;-official method of managing scarcity and public‑-;-service breakdown.
And that is in an advanced, democratic, social state that still, despite everything, treats queues with relative fairness under the philosophy of “first come, first served” and a cultural pride in patient waiting.
So how does the picture look in our unfortunate Arab world, where queues are neither fair, nor respected, nor transparent?
In Arab countries, queues move painfully slowly in banks, hospitals, government offices, and service centers. They are often manipulated through bribery, favoritism, and petty corruption. The closer you get to the front, the more you discover that another queue awaits inside the maze: a missing document, a forgotten signature, a new stamp´-or-a mysteriously absent employee.
Waiting is no longer an exception-;- it is the architecture of public life. Citizens do not wait for a single service-;- they live inside a chain of queues: a queue for salaries, a queue for electricity, a queue for passports, a queue for hospital beds and an even longer queue for a job that never arrives.
Thus, the queue in the Arab world is not a tool of organisation but a tool of concealment. It hides the state’s inability to meet rising demand with real capacity. It hides the lack of investment in health, education, and infrastructure. And above all, it hides the absence of political will to address the roots of the crisis.
Many queues are no longer visible. Hospital waiting lists that are never published. Court files that gather dust. Frozen housing applications. Administrative requests buried in drawers. The Arab citizen does not see a single queue-;- he feels trapped in a comprehensive system of waiting, his entire life postponed until further notice.
More dangerously, queues here are tied to a clear economic logic: when governments refuse to raise prices, taxes´-or-admit failure, they manage scarcity through time rather than money. They make people pay for the crisis with their lives, not their wallets. Instead of expanding capacity, they distribute pain temporally, through hours under the burning sun,´-or-in hospital corridors´-or-outside government doors.
In this sense, the queue becomes a political‑-;-economic choice, not an accident. A way to avoid difficult decisions by pushing citizens into endless waiting. Instead of acknowledging policy failure, governments -convert- failure into “lost time” in people’s lives.
From these queues emerges an entire class of brokers, middlemen and private companies selling “paid shortcuts.” Those with money bypass the queue. Those without remain at the back, watching their time and dignity erode.
The queue thus transforms from a symbol of “civilised fairness” into a stark emblem of inequality. Waiting is no longer equal: some wait in air‑-;-conditioned halls, others under the sun and some do not wait at all-;- their smartphones do the waiting for them.
Over time, queues do more than humiliate people-;- they erode trust in the state itself. When citizens feel that everything requires “a queue with no end,” the political system’s legitimacy begins to crumble.
Arabs already distrust their governments, witnessing daily incompetence and corruption. Add to that the feeling of being trapped in a queue that never moves, and you have the perfect fuel for social´-or-political explosion.
It is not enough to speak of “improving services”´-or-“enhancing performance.” Arab governments must first acknowledge the true scale of the queues, instead of hiding them behind bureaucratic complexity´-or-justifying them with empty rhetoric about “challenges” and “circumstances.” Managing crises through queues is not a solution-;- it is a guaranteed recipe for deeper anger.
One queue gives birth to another. Today’s queues produce tomorrow’s queues, until the state itself becomes a giant queue, everyone standing in it, no one reaching the front.
In the end, queues are not merely lines of people waiting for their turn. They are lines of states as well. States standing behind one another in a long queue called failure, moving one step forward only when their people fall ten steps behind.
The Arab queue is not in front of a service window-;- it is in front of a postponed future, as in Iraq today, where citizens queue for electricity, for passports and for the state itself.
Unless governments understand that waiting is not a policy, and that time is not a currency to be stolen from people’s lives, queues will continue to reproduce themselves, until one day we wake up to find that the state has become nothing but a giant queue … with no beginning and no end.

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