THE Lebanese have had a stinky summer since rubbish collection ground to a halt last month. Several days into the crisis, caused by an overflowing landfill site shutting its gates, many took matters into their own hands. Some burned their refuse. Others dumped it outside the parliament building. Twenty-five years after their civil war ended, the Lebanese have got used to doing things for themselves: hooking up to diesel generators and calling out a water tanker when the taps run dry. Yet the country is no longer an anomaly. Across the region Arabs are turning to the private sector and NGOs for basic services that faltering states do not provide.

There are extreme cases like Syria where war has destroyed services that, as in much of the region, were almost universal albeit not of high quality. Today the UN says at least a quarter of the country’s schools have been destroyed and only 43% of hospitals are fully operating. Yemen, the region’s poorest state, has long been dependent on foreign aid, but the latest outbreak of war is finishing off what little public infrastructure it had.

Decades of neglect are to blame, too. Egypt is a glaring case. Take education: although public spending on schooling has risen in nominal terms, it dropped from 5.1% of GDP in 2003 to 3.6% in 2013, according to government figures. The World Economic Forum ranks Egypt’s primary schools as the third worst in the world. Too many students cram into dirty classrooms. Parents say teachers often do not bother to turn up, or demand bribes to give the children a passing grade when they do.

Little wonder that tutoring is almost as widespread as school attendance: up to 70% of secondary school students by some estimates. Tasnim, a housewife, says she and her husband, a bank teller, spend almost 20% of their annual income of 200,000 Egyptian pounds ($25,500) to send their two sons to a private primary school. More parents are opting for home schooling, a new idea to the region.

A group of Egyptian doctors recently showed why Arabs have long shunned government hospitals. They posted photos of cats in wards and faeces on the floors of ward bathrooms. Other countries may not plumb such unhygienic depths, but even in relatively wealthy Tunisia and Saudi Arabia locals have long paid to see private doctors when sick.

Over in Iraq, locals are protesting about power and water cuts as the summer temperatures soar to 50ºC. Generators are now as ubiquitous in Baghdad as in Beirut despite the country’s oil wealth. In equally well-endowed Saudi Arabia an official earlier this year warned that the days of 24-hour power will end if consumption continues to rise at today’s rate. Access to services is worse outside big cities or in informal areas that have built up around them. In Morocco, a relative success story, almost half of rural inhabitants said they didn’t have access to running water in 2012. Further shortages loom since the Arab world includes 14 of the 20 most water-stressed countries; Jordan, which is struggling under the weight of Syrian refugees, is among the worst-off.

It wasn’t always this way. After independence, much of the Arab world laid on services for all its citizens; doing so was a priority for socialists such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. But the regimes were corrupt and often incompetent. Their sluggish economies did not generate enough cash. As the region’s populations grew rapidly, few governments could keep up.

Abuse of power

One problem is that many of them do not levy income tax. Instead, authoritarian states tend to treat services as a way of currying favour. Gulf royals offer liberal pay rises and grants to citizens on the understanding they will not hanker after a vote. Wars and turmoil have set things back, too. Today the average Arab sees the bureaucracy as a problem to navigate rather than a source of help.

Another woe is growing inequality: shoddy services are left for the poor while the rich pay to go private. The UN says Iraq’s scarcity of public services is feeding corruption as Iraqis pay bribes to jump the queue for access. But the quality of private services is patchy even for those who can afford it. And often there is no incentive to improve things. Lebanon’s generator businesses lobby against better state electricity. In many places, those running private services are the same people as, or closely connected to, those in government.

As security worsens, people increasingly rely on private policing; in turn further undermining the state. A Syrian food manufacturer pays local rebels to guard his factories. Egypt’s increasing reliance on informal justice rather than overburdened courts embeds discrimination. Minorities, such as the Copts, often lose legal protection as a result. Even when a court rules on something, police often have to be paid to carry out its orders. Religious groups prosper, too. In Lebanon Hizbullah runs services for the poorest of the Shia communities in its southern stronghold. The Muslim Brotherhood for years did the same in Egypt and elsewhere.

Since the Arab spring, rulers are paying more heed to keeping their citizens happy, if only because they fear for their own tenure. Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has created the post of minister for urban renewal and is promising to extend services to informal settlements. The jihadists of Islamic State (IS) have taken note too. IS has tried harder than other factions to keep water, power and telecoms going. Syrians living under their brutal rule say that at least there are basic services in the “caliphate”—unlike in areas held by other militias.