Foreign investments are pouring in, taking advantage of cheap labour and repressive laws. Last July, the Spanish company Telefonica paid 1.1 billion dollars for a second mobile telephone network licence. Fierce competition is developing between various international consortiums to buy up public companies being sold off by the government. The population of Morocco is 27 million, of which over half live in the rural areas. This is worse than the literacy rate in India.
More women die in childbirth than in any other country in northern Africa.
In the towns, the average period of schooling is between four and six years. Whilst schools are nominally open to all, education is not obligatory and many families, through ignorance or through poverty, send their small children out begging or else to work in conditions little removed from outright slavery. He personally attended the torture of some of his most hated opponents. Had the monarchy tried to maintain the naked dictatorship of the past, the result would have been a revolutionary explosion. This is why Hassan II in his time and now Mohamed VI are trying to shift their ground.