16 August 2010 By Abdul
Rahman Al-Rashid In a country with eight million migrant workers, it
is difficult for half a million unemployed citizens to
accept any official justification as to why they
remain jobless. Even if such talk concerns Saudi
Arabia after it announced its five-year development
plan on Tuesday, it also concerns eight other states
that produce and export enormous natural resources;
namely the GCC member states, plus Algeria, Libya and
Iraq. Unemployment of this magnitude means that the state
is having a real problem, either in terms of planning
or implementation. This is either because it has
produced a large number of educated citizens but
failed to provide them with jobs or in contrast
because the state has produced an army of incapable
citizens who are not fit to enter the job market. In
both cases i.e. planning and implementation, the
citizen is not responsible for the problem, but rather
the result [of it]. Therefore a government can never
run away from its responsibilities so long as it is
primarily responsible for managing the country's
natural resources. Every five years, Saudi Arabia announces its
five-year plan with regards to how the country will be
run over the next period; Saudi Arabia announced its
ninth five-year plan on Tuesday. This plan includes an
interpretation of the challenges of the current
situation, and future solutions to these. In this
plan, the government admitted that unemployment has
reached 10 percent, promising to reduce this rate by
approximately half, as well as accommodating the
hundreds of thousands of new job seekers. The problem here is that the definition of the term
unemployment is not clear to us, whilst the project to
reduce unemployment is vague and there are no details
surrounding this. The simple question is; how can an
additional million people find employment? If the
government is being criticized today, then it should
prepare itself for even more criticism when each
citizen graduating from university finds themselves
loitering on the streets. Saudi Arabia, as well as the other eight states
[that are rich in natural resources], are being blamed
more than other Arab countries for this state of
affairs for one simple reasons; they have huge oil and
gas resources. The challenge in front of them is how
to manage the income [from these resources]…rather
than how to obtain the income in the first place. This
contrasts with the rest of the Arab states who
struggle just to secure hard currency for their
treasury. Such countries that are rich in resources do
not suffer from overpopulation like Egypt, or extreme
poverty or political failure like Yemen or Sudan. Even
these three countries – which I am using as a example
– produce oil – however their standards of
development, and the challenges that they are facing,
are not the same. The challenges facing Saudi Arabia are related to
planning and implementation, as it still enjoys
considerable revenue and income, but at the same time
it suffers from the dilemmas of a developing country.
Saudi Arabia is now launching its ninth five-year
plan, meaning that 40 years have passed since this
development project first began and there are still a
number of problems that are being deferred from one
plan to the next. In practical terms, Saudi Arabia
only has one resource, and successive plans have
failed to ensure realistic additional – not
alternative – sources of income. How will we be able
to keep spending on our people when the population
continues to increase in terms of size and
requirements? Will the oil revenue be sufficient for
this? The second challenge concerns the state's inability
to create generations that work productively and
independently, as currently, millions of Saudis work
in the civil service. The government is expanding its
departments simply in order to accommodate an enormous
number of new employees due to the lack of other job
opportunities. This means that the civil service is
increasing without a need for these new employees.
There is also the chronic deficiency regarding the
continued failure of these development plans to
resolve the issues surrounding women’s employment. As
a result of this, 50 percent of society remains almost
inactive. Women are limited to working in female
education, and so almost all women are stuck within
one of three boxes, and are either students, teachers
or unemployed. Can the Ministry of Economy and
Planning be frank with us; what are your plans for the
millions of Saudi Arabian woman over the next five
years? Al Rashed is the general manager of Al -Arabiya television. He is also the
former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al- Awsat, and the leading Arabic weekly
magazine, Al Majalla. He is also a senior Columnist in the daily newspapers of
Al Madina and Al Bilad. He is a US post-graduate degree in mass communications.
He has been a guest on many TV current affairs programs. He is currently based
in Dubai. Comments 💬 التعليقات |