Before Kuwait had an elected council in any sense, there was a meeting. On 9 April 1930, corresponding to 14 Dhul Qidah 1348 AH, no fewer than fifty citizens gathered in the school building and elected twelve members to the municipal council. The National Assembly itself dates Kuwait’s first electoral experience to this council.
Who they were
Yousef bin Issa Al Qinaie, Mishaan Al Khudair Al Khaled, Sulaiman Al Adsani, Sayed Ali Al Sayed Sulaiman, Mohammad Ahmad Al Ghanim, Nasf bin Yousef Al Nasf, Ahmad Al Fahad Al Khaled, Abdulrahman Al Bahar, Khalifa bin Shaheen Al Ghanim, Mishari Hassan Al Badr, Ahmad Mohammad Hussein Maarafi and Yousef Saleh Al Humaidi.
Sheikh Abdullah Al Jaber was appointed chairman, and the council elected Sulaiman Khaled Al Adsani as director of the municipality. The municipality came into being after the approval of the amir, Sheikh Ahmad Al Jaber.
Where the money came from
Not the treasury. It was decided that funding would be a customs charge on goods, as a fixed source for the budget, set at half a per cent.
Where it sat
A small room in the merchants’ souq — in another account, a small rented shop in the inner market. In 1939 the municipality moved to its premises on Safat Square.
What it did
Its first work was neither grand nor symbolic: looking after the roads and removing doorsteps, and checking the cleanliness of shops.
How it was run
Members and the director were elected every two years, and the members met once a week to confer.
The rare figure
In the second council’s election in 1932, two hundred and fifty voters chose between nineteen candidates for twelve seats, and Al Adsani was returned as director with ten votes. The second council’s first decision was to approve printing the municipal law for publication.
Where the sources disagree
Some sources say twelve elected members; the National Assembly’s page says eleven members with a permanent chairman and a director. Nothing we consulted reconciles the two accounts, so both are given as they stand.
Photo: an old Kuwaiti house. By xiquinhosilva, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Al Arabi magazine, published by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters; the democratic life page on the National Assembly site; and the “Dreaming of a Modern Kuwait” series in Al Jarida.
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