Toilets To Wash What?

There is news in the media, "TL 10,000 toilet seats have been installed in the Ak Saray." Tezcan Karakuş Candan, chairwoman of the Ankara office of the Turkish Chamber of Architects, shared the pricing information with the public last Wednesday. Candan said: “The price depends on the rank of the intended users. Two types of toilet seats were installed in the palace which cost TL 5,000 ($2,200) and TL 10,000 ($4,500), respectively. We are providing the minimum price of the toilet seats. If they are custom-made, the price can be three times as much.” The value of a single toilet seat could sustain nine families for a whole month, she added.
Since the construction of a new presidential palace called the “Ak Saray,” a reference to the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), we have now learned that there are hundreds of toilets inside the palace. Previously, whether there were 1,000 or 2,000 rooms inside was a hot topic for discussion. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan later declared, and we learned in great happiness, that there are 1,150 rooms. In Islamic culture, people refer to “halal” as that whose earning is honest. You buy "halal" food with your "halal" earnings for your children and this is deemed to be the greatest happiness of a human being. Whatever the president has earned, eaten or drank, I sincerely and wholeheartedly wish that he will use those toilets with great enjoyment. However, the minimum wage in Turkey is still TL 891 and next week the government will declare the minimum wage rates for 2015. I again sincerely and wholeheartedly hope that it will exceed TL 1,000, although I think it will not. I wonder what an ordinary worker thinks about this situation.
I'm a lecturer at a faculty of law and there are some workers at the school who I see from time to time. In fact, they are prisoners on probation and the probation office sends them to several public buildings, including our faculty, to clean. The aim is for them to become integrated into society by working and starting a new life after their time in prison. I asked a few of them what they think about the Ak Saray and toilets worth thousands of lira as they were drinking tea during their break. None of them were happy when they learned that there were toilets installed in the building whose value was equal to a year of their earnings, even though most of them were AK Party voters. I then entered one of the toilets in the faculty that one of the probationers was cleaning. I asked him the same thing. He first smiled, then said: “They are consuming us as a whole and using those golden toilets, we are only cleaning them. This is our life. This is how it was and how it always will be.”
The AK Party previously defended social change, sustenance for the poor, equality in job procurements and decreasing income. Now we are at a point where we see the exact opposite. It is so extraordinary to see an Islamic-based political idea used to defend such public spending despite all the criticism they hear. It is not the first time we see a political movement regressing because of corruption, but it will be the first instance where we see that an Islamic movement is sinking because of it. If bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft and embezzlement are systemic and widespread in a country, it is hard to defend such a government. I think the votes that the AK Party was taking are decreasing and it will need more toilets to wash this kleptocracy.
As great British writer Arthur C. Clarke said: “The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.” Do we have to buy bathroom scales now?

GÜNAL KURŞUN (Cihan/Today's Zaman)