An ordinary Cabinet session last year issued an order to set in motion the process of political reforms, beginning with the reorganization of the municipal sector through wider people’s participation in local administration.
According to the Cabinet decision of Oct. 13, 2003, municipal councils all over the Kingdom will have half their members elected by the people with the remaining half appointed by the government.
We all awaited practical moves in the direction of elections. After several months, Prince Miteb, minister for municipal and rural affairs, stated, “special committees and action teams had been set up. Agreement with international consultative agencies and experts to establish the necessary plans for the election process has been reached. Regulations and statutes related to elections were studied with the aim of producing an integrated election system conforming to the Kingdom’s values, guaranteeing maximum effectiveness in the people’s participation in local government administration through municipalities and the transparency of the steps and fairness of the results.”
Elections are not something totally new in Saudi Arabia though there have been none for the past 40 years. Municipal elections in western Saudi Arabia including Makkah, Madinah, Taif, Jeddah, Yanbu and Qunfudha were held in 1926. Municipal councils had existed in the Hijaz since 1869 and were set up during the Ottoman period. (See Sanook Havar Groniyeh’s book: Pages from the History of Makkah). This practice continued until well into the Saudi period in 1967 when the government decided to extend elected municipal councils to all the regions of the Kingdom. After elections were held in Riyadh and other areas, an order was issued to suspend their implementation until election statutes had been reviewed. The review process continued until 1976 when the late King Khaled promulgated a system stipulating that half the total seats on the council should be filled by election and the remaining half reserved for nominated members (Aziz Abu Hamad’s Empty Reforms 1992). This system, however, was not implemented until the announcement of the Cabinet’s decision in October 2003.
The registration of all eligible voters, determining constituencies and other formalities will require time but have to be completed before the filing of nominations for the elections starts. The elections will be held in 13 regions for members of 178 municipal councils. Seven members will be elected from each of the three largest cities and seven others will be nominated to each of these councils.
The municipal council’s significance springs from the fact that it serves as one of society’s most important civilian institutions. It guarantees all citizens, men and women, their rights and allows transparent participation in administration. The council is the major supervising body of the municipality’s executive machinery. It brings people’s problems and needs to the municipality’s attention and also supervises the municipality’s financial activities in order to reduce and eliminate corruption. In fact it supervises everything under municipal jurisdiction — from licensing to safety and security arrangements, from recycling of waste to garbage disposal, from prevention of begging to maintenance and preservation of historical buildings, from environmental concerns to promoting cultural events and so on. These are all matters closely related to our daily lives. Every citizen should have a legitimate means for demanding that the municipality do its duties and for questioning its failures and perceived negligence. Every citizen should have the right to do both or either.
— Hatoon Al-Fassi is a Saudi writer and historian.
