taroudant: Hanging Out

When the King came in January he brought with him the auditors. Taroudant has had a lot of money pumped into the area recently; £150million from UNESCO to rebuild the walls and similar amounts mostly from the state for each of 2 projects; to build a dam for irrigation and to build a juicing factory for local oranges. As there is not the degree of separation between monarch and state as in Britain the King probably regards this as his money.
According to local folklore he may be very well advised to visit and see his investments for himself as the story is that back in the 80s in the old King's time money was allocated to build the dam. The accountants in Rabat were keen to make sure that all the money was properly spent and not redirected to more personal and less public improvements so they demanded rigorous receipts and accounting. The accounts produced were exemplary and the project was signed off as a development success. It was only sometime later in the 90s when on of the accountants decided to visit and view the dam that it was discovered that on paper it was a fine dam but that was where it remained on paper. At least the King has seen for himself that something is being built this time and doubtless he brought engineers and quantity surveyors with the auditors to check the books.
However the auditors did not confine themselves merely to these projects. Whilst the provincial governor is appointed by the King the town is run by an elected official to whom I shall refer as the mayor a la Boris Johnson although that is not a word the moroccans would use. The auditors also examined the mayoral accounts and deficiencies were found. Whether these were caused by poor accounting, overspend or peccary is a matter of rumour and speculation but there appears to be a consensus that a deficit exists. The mayoralty has been told that the deficit must be made good.
Local officials are now seeking ways to raise money to balance the books. It is a feature of souks that traders hang goods from the rafters of the passages between stalls. They have now been told that there is to be a new tax on this facility and goods projecting more than 30 cm from the front of the shop will attract this tax. Needless to say the proposal is unpopular and appears to affect traders in cloth and garments rather than jewellers or greengrocers and so is meeting some resistance. Whether it will be successfully imposed remains to be seen.
However if additional monies do have to be raised this would explain the transformation of Place Tamaklate. This has always been an empty square (except for the juice stalls and taxi rank) but recently it has sprouted numerous traders , mostly in kitchenware but also clothes, plastcs and cheap jewellry. As this coincided with the hanging out charge we have assumed that it is linked and that the town is trying to raise additional monies from its markets but then we could just have got the wrong end of a rumour through language difficulties