JEDDAH, 27 April 2003 — Students at Jeddah’s privately-owned Institute of Business Administration (IBA) recently elected their own student union leader in a democratic ballot, choosing as their representative Sultan Abdel Rahman Al-Sharani, a 22-year-old who has been studying at IBA for 18 months.

IBA has 500 students on its rolls, and Al-Sharani claimed that over 90 percent of them voted in the elections. Two hundred voted for him, he added, which is seven more than the number of votes gained by the candidate who came in second, 18-year-old Rakan Omar Faruk Aksoy.

The election procedure followed the Western “first past the post” democratic model, with voting papers issued to students who privately ticked a box next to their preferred candidate before dropping it into a sealed ballot box.

“Many of the students thought that this was a very strange experience,” Al-Sharani told Arab News. “They jokingly asked one another while voting, ‘Hey, where are we? In America?’”

The Student Union, according to Al-Sharani, was set up to act as a bridge between teachers and their students, and also to instill a sense of community among the students.

The union has control of a budget allocated for extra curricular activities, giving the union authority in consultation with the college authorities when it comes to organizing student activities and events. There is also a weekly committee meeting between representatives of the Student Union and IBA’s administration, at which student concerns are raised and debated.

The Jeddah-based political commentator and TV personality Hussein Shobokshi told Arab News that the democratic student union elections were a “very healthy sign” of change in Saudi Arabia.

“These kind of elections reflect the progress and the development when it comes to the social dynamics of the Kingdom,” he added. “Such changes can help to promote non-governmental organizations which are paramount in the establishment of any healthy and prosperous society.”

However, Usama Al-Kurdi, a prominent member of the Kingdom’s unelected Shoura Council, cautioned that “I don’t think the importance of these elections should be blown out of proportion, because IBA is just one small institute.”

Like all democratic elections, IBA’s was not without its controversies. Aksoy, the student who came second in the elections, complained about a lack of transparency and the presence of too many loopholes, to the extent that he believes that the end result was flawed. Drawing attention to the fact that there were only seven votes between him and the victor, he told Arab News that he has “no trust in the result”.

“If you ask the people whom they voted for, they will say they voted for me, but I didn’t win. The same thing happened in the last elections, but there’s no way the results can be challenged.”

Rakan wants new regulations stating that students should not be allowed to take their ballot paper outside the polling station, and that there should be a member of staff present with a list to tick off students who have already voted who can thus prevent students from voting twice in the same election.

“Next time I’ll stand again,” he nevertheless declared.