A number of Moroccan activists on social media called for keeping the current clock (Greenwich Mean Time) and stopping the extra hour permanently.
On March 10, Morocco announced a return to Greenwich Mean Time and a sixty-minute delay in the clock, a step that is taken once a year with the advent of the month of Ramadan before returning to the daylight saving time system.
Since 2018, the Kingdom decided to add 60 minutes to the country’s official time for various reasons, including saving energy by gaining an hour of light, and getting closer to the time of its economic partners, especially in Europe.
Daylight saving time controversy
A number of Moroccans who reject daylight saving time stress that there are no clear and practical reasons that justify the continuation of “GMT+1” for 11 months, considering that this time negatively affects the psychology of individuals and causes exhaustion and fatigue due to changes affecting the biological clock.
A blogger named Muhammad and Laila shared a post on Facebook in which he wrote: “We do not want the extra hour after Ramadan,” and accompanied it with the hashtag “No_to_the_extra_hour.”
As for Muhammad Al-Moudin, he also wrote on Facebook: “Moroccans are demanding the abolition of the additional hour after the month of Ramadan and the maintenance of Greenwich Mean Time… Praise be to God for this blessed hour.”
The government makes excuses
The Moroccan government had published the details of the study according to which it decided to adopt the daylight saving time system permanently since 2018 and throughout the months of the year with the exception of Ramadan, and among the most prominent things it stated:
- Not adopting one time throughout the year causes imbalances in the biological clock and hormonal disorders in individuals.
- 77 percent of respondents confirmed that changing the legal clock leads to sleep disturbances during the first days after returning to the legal clock, while 70 percent of them considered that they had lost one to two hours of sleep.
- 54 percent of the people surveyed reported a decrease in concentration and alertness during the first period of the time change.
- Traffic accidents increase by 10 percent when changing the clock frequently.
- Morocco was able to achieve energy savings thanks to the implementation of Greenwich Mean Time +1, in addition to contributing to the preservation of the environment as a result of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide thanks to the economy in the consumption of fossil energy.
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