One of Yemen’s worst and most common political habits is forming commissions. As soon as some issue or problem emerges, the president or prime minister rushes to form commissions. “Inquiry commissions” have turned into a kind of a phobia for Yemeni citizens, who fear that the problem or issue will be diluted by forming a commission to absorb the street’s anger until the problem gets forgotten, or, more precisely, until a bigger problem happens and overshadows the old one. Then a new commission is formed for the new problem, and so forth.

Also, even when the matter is not about dealing with a disaster but about making a decision about the future, whenever decision-makers wish avoid confronting something or solving some problem, they resort to a commission to do their job.

In less than two weeks, Yemen’s most important and influential commission ended its work and declared dividing the country into six federal regions. The commission completed its work in determining the number of regions of the country, their type, and based on non-developmental, non-water, non-geographic, and non-cultural criteria. The commission was formed because the National Dialogue Conference failed to determine the number and type of provinces, and after the conference gave the president a mandate to form the commission in a non-democratic manner.

However, other commissions with limited tasks — such as investigating the assassination of a certain figure or a terrorist attack that left dozens of victims dead — never seem to end their work, and when they do end their work, the results remain secret, or fail completely to reach the goal for which they were formed.