A battle is raging between the Saudi government and some 25 business sectors following the decision to Saudize them by force.
The battleground was the gold shops. It was the second test for the Saudization drive following the decision to ban foreigners from working in the vegetable wholesale markets. The state won that first round. The initial result of the second round is that one third of the gold shops in the Kingdom have closed, according to press reports, in clear defiance of the official decision.
Although it is a bloodless battle and no bullets are fired and even the propaganda is muted at best, it is nevertheless crucial from the political and security perspectives in a country with more than six million foreign workers from more than 120 countries and a rising population of unemployed locals. This is a potential time bomb.
It is a strange situation when both unemployment and the recruitment of foreign workers are on the rise. That is why the decision has shifted from business to politicians. The government threw market laws out of the window saying the arguments businessmen continue to present why things must stay as they are are valid and logical but insufficient. In their view the market requires a cheap and obedient workforce to score the required success and keep the prices of products and services down.
Those concerned with the market’s political stability take a different view; it is incomprehensible to them that planeloads of new foreign workers from every corner of the globe keep landing in the country on a daily basis while the local market is awash with the unemployed.
No doubt the government will, in the end, prevail because it has the better weapons — the power to enforce decisions and the support of the street. Threats of closures, of the black market taking over and of businesses moving to neighboring Gulf states don’t wash. Traders have one last solution available to them: eat their gold. The government is confident that wedding parties will still take place without the gold traders.
This brave step — and the battle is threatening to engulf a further 24 sectors — is nonetheless bound to upset the already shaky link that is being made between the economy and politics. It puts the principle that links security to the market and unemployment to terrorism to the test. The link has from the beginning seemed doubtful to many, so perhaps it would not be a bad thing if these matters were untangled.
The security problem is not directly related to unemployment. How else to explain the fact that Osama Bin Laden hails from a family which sits at the very top of the economic ladder?
Undeniably, however, there is a danger that future terrorism may arise from the armies of the unemployed in one of the richest countries in the region.
If by enforcing its decisions the government manages to contain the employment crisis, it will certainly address the threat of future terrorism, though it may not be doing much about today’s. Terrorism is a cultural phenomenon that affects those in work before the unemployed and the educated before the illiterate. It requires the closure of shops peddling imported ideologies.
